conversational reason, or ‘dialogical reason.’ With ‘reason,’ Grice is following
Ariskant. There’s the ‘ratio’ and there’s the “Vernunft.” “To converse” can
mean to have sex (cf. know) so one has to be careful. Grice is using
‘conversational’ casually. First, he was aware of the different qualifications
for ‘implication’. There is Nowell-Smith’s contextual implication and C. K.
Grant’s ‘pragmatic implication.’ So he chose ‘conversational implication’
himself. Later, when narrowing down the notion, he distinguished between
‘conversational implication’ and ‘non-conversational implication’: “Thank you.
B: You’re welcome.” If B is following the maxim, ‘be polite,’ the implication
that he is pleased he was able to assist his emissor is IMPLICATED but not
conversationally so. It is not a ‘conversational implication.’ Grice needs to
restrict the notion for philosophical purposes. Both for the framework of his
theory (it is easier to justify transcendentally conversational implication
than it is non-conversational implication). Note that ‘I am pleased I was able
to assist’ is CANCELLABLE or defeatible, so that’s not the issue. In any case,
both ‘conversational impication’ and these type of calculable
‘non-conversational’ implication still yielding from some ‘maxim’ (such as ‘be
polite’) Grice covers under the generic “non-conventional” precisely because
they can be defeated. When it comes to NON-DEFEASIBLE implicatura, Grice uses
‘conventional implication’ (as in “She was poor but she was honest.”). Grice
did not find these fun. And it shows. Strawson stuck with them, but his
philosophising about them ain’t precisely ‘fun.’ Used in Retrospective, p. 369.
Also: conversational rationality. Surely, “principle of conversational
rationality” sounds otiose. Expectation of mutual rationality sounds better.
Critique of conversational reason sounds best! Grice is careful here. When he
provides a reductive analysis of ‘reasoning,’ this goes as follows: the
reasoner reasons from premise to conclusion. That’s the analysandum. What’s the
analysans? At least it involves TWO clauses: If the reasoner reasons from
premise to conclusion, it is assumed that he BELIEVES that the premise obtains;
and he believes that the conclusion obtains. This has to be generalised to
cover the desiderative, using ‘accept.’ He accepts that the premise obtains,
and he accepts that the conclusion obtains. But there is obviously a SECOND
condition: that the conclusion follows from the premise! He uses ‘demonstrably’
for that, or the demonstratum.’ He is open as to what kind of yielding is
involved because he wants to allow for inductive reasoning and abductive
reasoning, not just deductive reasoning. AND THERE IS A TYPICALLY GRICEIAN
third condition, involving CAUSATION. He had used ‘cause’ in reductive analyses
before – if not so much in ‘meaning,’ due to Urmson’s counterexample involving
‘bribery,’ where ‘cause’ does not seem to do – but in his analysis of
‘intending’ for the British Academy. So at Oxford he promotes this THIRD causal
condition as involving that, naturally enough, it is the rasoner’s BELIEF that
demonstrably q follows from p, which CAUSES the reasoner TO BELIEVE (or more
generally, accept) that the conclusion obtains. Grice is happy with that belief
in the validity of the demonstration ‘populates’ the world of alethic beliefs,
and does not concern with generalising that into a generic ‘acceptance.’ The
word ‘rationalist’ is anathema at Oxford, because tutor after tutor has
brainwashed their tutees that the distinction is ‘empiricst-rationalist’ and
that at Oxford we are ‘empiricists.’ So Grice is really being ‘heretic’ here in
the words of G. P. Baker. demonstratum: The Eng. word “reason”
and the Fr. word “raison” are both
formed on the basis of Roman “reor,” to count or calculate, whence think,
believe. The Roman verb translates the Grecian “λέγειν,” two of whose principal
meanings it retains, but only two: count and think. The third principal meaning
of the Grecian term, speak, discourse, which designates a third type of putting
into relation and proportion, is rendered by other Roman series: “dicere”
(originally cognate with ‘deixis,’ and so not necessarily ‘verbal’), “loquor,” “orationem
habere” (the most ‘vocal’ one, as it relates to the ‘mouth,’ cf. ‘orality’) or
“sermonem habere,” so that ultimately the Grecian λόγος is approached by Roman
philosophers by means of a syntagm, “ratio et oratio,” reason and discourse.
Each vernacular fragments the meaning of logos into a greater or lesser. Cf.
‘principium reddendae rationis.’ Rationality functions as a principle of the
intelligibility of the world and history, particularly in Hegel. Then there’s
The Partitions of Reason and Semantic diffractions. Although there is no
language that retains under a single word all the meanings of logos except by
bringing logos into the language in question, the distribution of these
meanings is more or less close to Roman. For the classical Fr. word “raison,” which maintains almost all the
Roman meanings including the mathematical sense of proportion, as in “raison
d’une série,” or “raison inverse,” a contemporary Fr. -G. dictionary proposes the following terms:
Vernunft, Verstand rational faculty. This example shows that the whole of the
vocabulary is thus mobilized. Reason and faculties We can distinguish between
two interfering systems. The first designates reason, identified with thought
in general, in its relationship to a bodily and/or mental instance. The second
situates reason in a hierarchy of faculties whose organization it determines.
Regarding the first system, as it is expressed in various languages, where one
will find studies of the main distortions, especially around the expressions of
the Roman ‘anima.’ Philosophers especially emphasize the ways of designating
reason and mind that appear to be the most irreducible from one language to
another. Regarding the second system, and the partitions that do not coincide.
For Grice, ‘to understand’ presupposes ‘rationality – not for Kant, who sticks
with Verstand/Vernunft distinction. Ratio speculatum, praticatum. From
Aristotle to Kant, two great domains of rationality have been distinguished:
theory, or speculative reason, and practice. The lurality of meanings, each
represented by one or more specific words. The first question, from the point
of view of the difference of languages, is thus that of the breadth of the
meaning of “reason” or its equivalents, and of the systems diffracting the meanings
of logos and then of ratio. But another complex of problems immediately arises.
The Roman “ratio” absorbs the meanings of other Grecian terms, such as νοῦς and
διάνοια, which are also translated in other, more technical ways, such as
intellectus; so that reason, in the sense of rationality, is a comprehensive
term, whereas ‘reason’ in the sense of intellect or understanding is a singular
and differentiated faculty. However, none of the comprehensive terms or systems
of opposition coincides with those of another language, which are moreover
changing. Then there’s Reason and Rationality: man, animal, god. Since
Aristotle’s definition of man as an animal endowed with logos, which Roman
writers rendered by “animal rationale” — omitting the discursive dimension—reason,
or the logos, is a specific difference that defines man by his difference from
other living beings and/or his participation in a divine or cosmic nature.
Reason is opposed to madness understood as de-mentia. More broadly, reason is
conceived in terms of difference from what does not belong to its domain and
falls outside its immediate law, but which man may, in certain ways, share with
other animals, such as sensation, passion, imagination, and possibly memory.
Rationality and the principle of intelligibility. Rationality, defined by the
logos, is connected with logic as the art of speaking and thinking, and with
its founding principles. Les quodlibet cinq, six et sept. Ed. by M. de Wulf and J. Hoffmans. Louvain,
Belg.: Institut supérieur de Philosophie de l’Université, 191 Hegel, Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich. Elements of the Phil.
of Right. Tr. H. Nisbet and
ed. by Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge
, . . Science of LogiTr. V. Miller.
London: Allen and Unwin, . . Werke. Ed.
by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. 20 vols. FrankfuSuhrkamp, .
Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Tr. Albert Hofstadter Bloomington: Indiana , . .
Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington:
Indiana , . Hume, D. . A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. by D.
Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford , . Kant, Immanuel.
Critique of Practical Reason. Translated and ed. by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge , . .
Critique of Pure Reason. 2nd ed. Tr. N.
Kemp-Smith. : Macmillan, 193 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Opuscules et fragments
inédits de Leibniz. Extraits des manuscrits. Ed. by Louis Couturat. : Presses Universitaires
de France, 190 Reprint. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, . . Philosophical Essays.
Translated and ed. by Roger Ariew and
Dan Garber. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, . . Philosophical Papers and Letters.
2nd ed. Ed. and Tr. Leroy E. Loemker. Dordrecht, Neth.: D.
Reidel, . . Die philosophischen Schriften. Ed.
by I. Gerhardt. 7 vols. Berlin, 187590. Reprint. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms,
. . Leibnizens mathematische Schriften. Ed. by I. Gerhardt. 7 vols. Berlin, 18496 .
Textes inédits d’après les manuscrits de la Bibliothèque provinciale de Hanovre.
Ed. by Gaston Gru2 vols. : Presses Universitaires
de France, 194 Locke, J.. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon, .
Micraelius, J. . Lexicon philosophicum terminorum philosophis usitatorum. 2nd
ed. Stettin, 166 Paulus, J.. Henri de Gand: Essai sur les tendances de sa
métaphysique. : Vrin, 193 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph.
Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. by
Jörg Jantzen, T. Buchheim, Jochem
Hennigfeld, Wilhelm G. Jacobs, and Siegbert Peetz. 40 vols.
StuttgaFrommann-Holzboog, . . Of the I as the Principle of Phil. , or On the
Unconditional in Human Knowledge. In The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four
Early Essays 17949 Translated with commentary by F. Marti. Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell , . Spinoza, Baruch. Complete Works. With tr.s by Samuel Shirley.
Ed. by Michael L. Morgan. Indianapolis,
IN: Hackett, . . Oper2nd ed. Ed. by
Gebhardt. 5 vols. Heidelberg: Carl Winters.
conversational
trustworthiness
– or just trust. Principle of Conversational trustworthiness -- Conversational
desideratum of maximal evidence, information bearing on the truth or falsity of
a proposition. In philosophical discussions, a person’s evidence is generally
taken to be all the information a person has, positive or negative, relevant to
a proposition. The notion of evidence used in philosophy thus differs from the
ordinary notion according to which physical objects, such as a strand of hair
or a drop of blood, counts as evidence. One’s information about such objects
could be evidence in the philosophical sense. The concept of evidence plays a
central role in our understanding of knowledge and rationality. According to a
traditional and widely held view, one has knowledge only when one has a true
belief based on very strong evidence. Rational belief is belief based on
adequate evidence, even if that evidence falls short of what is needed for
knowledge. Many traditional philosophical debates, such as those about our
knowledge of the external world, the rationality of religious belief, and the
rational basis for moral judgments, are largely about whether the evidence we
have in these areas is sufficient to yield knowledge or rational belief. The
senses are a primary source of evidence. Thus, for most, if not all, of our
beliefs, ultimately our evidence traces back to sensory experience. Other
sources of evidence include memory and the testimony of others. Of course, both
of these sources rely on the senses in one way or another. According to rationalist
views, we can also get evidence for some propositions through mere reason or
reflection, and so reason is an additional source of evidence. The evidence one
has for a belief may be conclusive or inconclusive. Conclusive evidence is so
strong as to rule out all possibility of error. The discussions of skepticism
show clearly that we lack conclusive evidence for our beliefs about the
external world, about the past, about other minds, and about nearly any other
topic. Thus, an individual’s perceptual experiences provide only inconclusive
evidence for beliefs about the external world since such experiences can be
deceptive or hallucinatory. Inconclusive, or prima facie, evidence can always
be defeated or overridden by subsequently acquired evidence, as, e.g., when
testimonial evidence in favor of a proposition is overridden by the evidence
provided by subsequent experiences.
evidentialism, in the philosophy of religion, the view that religious
beliefs can be rationally accepted only if they are supported by one’s “total
evidence,” understood to mean all the other propositions one knows or
justifiably believes to be true. Evidentialists typically add that, in order to
be rational, one’s degree of belief should be proportioned to the strength of
the evidential support. Evidentialism was formulated by Locke as a weapon
against the sectarians of his day and has since been used by Clifford among
many others to attack religious belief in general. A milder form of
evidentialism is found in Aquinas, who, unlike Clifford, thinks religion can
meet the evidentialist challenge. A contrasting view is fideism, best
understood as the claim that one’s fundamental religious convictions are not
subject to independent rational assessment. A reason often given for this is
that devotion to God should be one’s “ultimate concern,” and to subject faith
to the judgment of reason is to place reason above God and make of it an idol.
Proponents of fideism include Tertullian, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and some
Vittersians. A third view, which as yet lacks a generally accepted label, may
be termed experientialism; it asserts that some religious beliefs are directly
justified by religious experience. Experientialism differs from evidentialism
in holding that religious beliefs can be rational without being supported by
inferences from other beliefs one holds; thus theistic arguments are
superfluous, whether or not there are any sound ones available. But
experientialism is not fideism; it holds that religious beliefs may be directly
grounded in religious experience wtihout the mediation of other beliefs, and
may be rationally warranted on that account, just as perceptual beliefs are
directly grounded in perceptual experience. Recent examples of experientialism
are found in Plantinga’s “Reformed Epistemology,” which asserts that religious
beliefs grounded in experience can be “properly basic,” and in the contention
of Alston that in religious experience the subject may be “perceiving God.”
converse. 1 Narrowly, the result of the
immediate logical operation called conversion on any categorical proposition,
accomplished by interchanging the subject term and the predicate term of that
proposition. Thus, the converse of the categorical proposition ‘All cats are
felines’ is ‘All felines are cats’. 2 More broadly, the proposition obtained
from a given ‘if . . . then . . .’ conditional proposition by interchanging the
antecedent and the consequent clauses, i.e., the propositions following the
‘if’ and the ‘then’, respectively; also, the argument obtained from an argument
of the form ‘P; therefore Q’ by interchanging the premise and the
conclusion. converse, outer and inner,
respectively, the result of “converting” the two “terms” or the relation verb
of a relational sentence. The outer converse of ‘Abe helps Ben’ is ‘Ben helps
Abe’ and the inner converse is ‘Abe is helped by Ben’. In simple, or atomic,
sentences the outer and inner converses express logically equivalent
propositions, and thus in these cases no informational ambiguity arises from
the adjunction of ‘and conversely’ or ‘but not conversely’, despite the fact
that such adjunction does not indicate which, if either, of the two converses
intended is meant. However, in complex, or quantified, relational sentences
such as ‘Every integer precedes some integer’ genuine informational ambiguity
is produced. Under normal interpretations of the respective sentences, the
outer converse expresses the false proposition that some integer precedes every
integer, the inner converse expresses the true proposition that every integer
is preceded by some integer. More complicated considerations apply in cases of
quantified doubly relational sentences such as ‘Every integer precedes every
integer exceeding it’. The concept of scope explains such structural ambiguity:
in the sentence ‘Every integer precedes some integer and conversely’,
‘conversely’ taken in the outer sense has wide scope, whereas taken in the
inner sense it has narrow scope.
convey: used in index to WoW. Etymology is
funny. From con-via – cum-via, go on the road with.
coonway: a., english
philosopher whose Principia philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae 1690;
English translation, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy,
1692 proposes a monistic ontology in which all created things are modes of one
spiritual substance emanating from God. This substance is made up of an
infinite number of hierarchically arranged spirits, which she calls monads.
Matter is congealed spirit. Motion is conceived not dynamically but vitally.
Lady Conway’s scheme entails a moral explanation of pain and the possibility of
universal salvation. She repudiates the dualism of both Descartes and her
teacher, Henry More, as well as the materialism of Hobbes and Spinoza. The work
shows the influence of cabalism and affinities with the thought of the mentor
of her last years, Francis Mercurius van Helmont, through whom her philosophy
became known to Leibniz.
co-operatum: Grice previously used ‘help’ – which has a Graeco-Roman
counterpart -- Grice is very right in noting that ‘helpfulness’ does not
‘equate’ cooperation. Correspondingly he changed the principle of
conversational helpfulness into the principle of conversational co-operation.
He also points that one has to distinguish between the general theisis that
conversation is rational from the thesis that the particular form of
rationality that conversation takes is cooperative rationality, which most
libertarians take as ‘irrationality’ personified, almost! Grice is obsessed
with this idea that ‘co-operation’ need not just be ‘conversational.’ Indeed,
his way to justify a ‘rationalist’ approach is through analogy. If he can find
‘co-operative’ traits in behaviour other than ‘conversational,’ the greater the
chance to generalise, and thus justify. The co-operation would be
self-justifying. co-operation. The hyphen in Strawson and Wiggins (p. 520). Grice
found ‘co-operative’ too Marxist, and would prefer ‘help,’ as in ‘mutual help.’
This element of ‘mutuality’ is necessary. And it is marked grammatical, with
the FIRST person and the SECOND person. The third need NOT be a person – can be
a dog (as in “Fido is shaggy”). The mututality is necessary in that the
emissor’s intention involves the belief that his recipient is rational. You
cannot co-operate with a rock. You cannot co-operate with a vegetal. You cannot
cooperate with a non-rational animal. You can ONLY cooperate with a co-rational
agent. Animal co-operation poses a nice side to the Griceian idea. Surely the
stereotype is a member of species S cooperating with another specimen of the
same species. But then there are great examples of ‘sym-biosis’: the crane that
gets rid off the hippopotamus’s ticks. Is this cooperation? Is this
intentional? If Grice thinks that there is a ‘mechanistically derivable’
explanation,, it isn’t. He did not necessarily buy ‘bio-sociological’
approaches. Which was a problem, because we don’t have much philosophical
seriouis discourse on ‘cooperation’ at the general level Grice is aiming at.
Except in ethics, which is biased. So it is no wonder that Grice had to rely on
‘meta-ethics’ to even conceptualise the field of cooperation: the maximin
becomes a balance between a principle of conversational egoism and a principle
of conversational altruism. He later found the egoism-tag as ‘understood.’ And
his ‘altruism’ became ‘helpfulness,’ became ‘benevolence,’ and became
‘co-operation.’
copulatum: It was an Oxonian exercise to trace the ‘copula.’ “I’ve
been working like a dog, should be sleeping like a log.” Where is the copula:
Lennon is a dog-like worker – Lennon is a potential log-like sleeper.” Grice
uses ‘copula’ in PPQ. The term is
sometimes used ambiguously, for ‘conjunctum.’ A conjunctive is called a
copulative. But Grice obviously narrows down the use of copulatum to izz and
hazz. He is having in mind Strawson.The formula does not allow for differences
in tense and grammatical number; nor for the enormous class of * all
'-sentences which do not contain, as their main verb, the verb * to be '. We
might try to recast the sentences so that they at least fitted into one of the
two patterns * All x is y ' or ' All x are y ' ; but the results would be, as
English, often clumsy andt sometimes absurd. for Aristotle, 'Socrates is a man'
is true "in virtue of his being that thing which constitutes existing for
him (being which constitutes his mode of existence)," Hermann Weidemann,
"In Defense of Aristotle's Theory of Predication," p. 84— only so
long as that "being" be taken as an assertion of being per se. But
Weidemann wants to take it merely copulatively. In "Prädikation," p.
1196, he says that when 'is' is used as tertium adiacens it has no meaning by
itself, but merely signifies the connection of subject and predicate. Cf. his
"Aristoteles über das isolierte Aussagenwort," p. 154. H. P. Grice,
"Aristotle on the Multiplicity of Being," also rejects an existential
reading of tertium adiacens and pushes for a copulative one. Cf. Alan Code,
"Aristotle: Essence and Accident," pp. 414-7. Aristotle has connected the semantic multiplicity in the copula not with variation
between predicates of one subject, but with variation between essential (per
se)predications upon different (indeed categorially different) subjects (such ...eads
me to wonder whether Aristotle may be maintaining not only that the copula exhibits
semantic ...An extended treatment of my views about izzing and hazzing can be found in
Alan. A crucial ... on occasion admit catégorial variation in the sense
of the copulative 'is',
evidently is ... Aristotle has connected the semantic multiplicity in the copula not with
variation ...with the copulative 'is';
so he rather strangely interprets the last remark. (1017a27-30) as alluding to
semantic multiplicity in
the copula as being. (supposedly)
a consequence of semantic multiplicity in the existential 'is'. This
interpretation seems difficult to defend. When Aristotle says that
predicates sometimes say what a thing is, sometimes what is it like (its
quality), sometimes how much it is (its quantity) and so on, he seems to be
saying that if we consider the range of predicates which can be applied to
some item, for example to a substance like Socrates or a cow,
these predicates are categorically various, and so the uses of the copula in the ascription of these
predicates will undergo corresponding variation"H. P. Grice brings
the question he had considered with J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson at Oxford
about Aristotle’s categories.In “Categoriae,” Aristotle distinguishes two sorts
of case of the application of word or phrase to a range of situations. In one
sort of case, both the word and a single definition (account, “logos”) apply
throughout that range. In the other sort of case, the word but no single
definition applies through the range.These two sorts of case have a different
nature. In the first case, the word is applied synonymously (of better as
“sunonuma” – literally “sun-onuma”, cognomen). In the second case the word is
applied homonymously (or better “homonuma”, or aequi-vocally, literally
“homo-numa.”)Grice notes that a homonymous application has some sort of
sub-division which Aristotle calls "paronymy" (“paronuma”), literally
‘para onuma.’To put it roughly, homonyms have multiple meanings – what Grice
has as “semantic multiplicity.”Synonyms have one meaning or ONE SENSE, but
apply to different kinds of thing.A paronym, such as ‘be,’ derives from other
things of a different kind. Paronyms display a ‘UNIFIED semantic multiplicity,’
if that’s not too oxymoronic: how can the multiplicity be unified while remaining
a multiplicity? Aristotle states, confusingly, that "being is said in many
ways". As Grice notes, ‘good’ (agathon) also is a paronym that displays
unified semantic multiplicity.In Nichomachean Ethics, even more confusingly,
Aristotle says that "good is said in as many ways as being". He
doesn’t number the ways.So the main goal for Grice is to answer the question:
If, as Aristotle suggests, at least some expressions connected with the notion
of "being" exhibit semantic multiplicity, of which expressions is the
suggestion true? Grice faces the question of existential being and Semantic
Multiplicity. Grice stresses that Semantic Multiplicity of "be" is not only the case of it
interpretation. Other words he wants to know in what way of interpretation of this
word the philosophers can detect the SM. Generally speaking there are four
possible interpretations of "being": First, "be" is taken
to mean "exist.”Second, "be" is taken as a copula in a
predication statement.Third, "be" is taken for expressing the identity.Fourth,
"Being" is considered to be a noun (equivalent to ‘object' or
‘entity') – subjectification, category shift: “Smith’s being tall suggests he
is an athlete.” (cfr. A. G. N. Flew on the ‘rubbish’ that adding ‘the’ to
‘self’ results in – contra J. R. Jones). Philosophers have some problems for
this kind of theory with separating interpretations from each other. It is
natural for thinkers to unite the first and the fourth. The object or entity
should be the things which already exist. So the SM would attach to such a noun
as "entity" if, and only if, it also attaches to the word
"exist". Furthermore, it seems to be a good idea to unite the first
and the third. In some ways theorist can paraphrase the word "exist"
in the terms of self-identity. Grice gives an example: “Julius Caesar exists if
and only if Julius Caesar is identical for Julius Caesar.” Cf. Grice on
‘relative identity.’So the philosophers should investigate SM in two possible
interpretations – when "be" is understood as "exist" and
when "be" is understood as copula. From Aristotle's point of view
‘being’ is predicated of everything. From this statement, Grice draws the
conclusion that "exist" can apply to every thing, even a square
circle.This word should signify a plurality of universals and exhibits semantic
multiplicity. But Grice continue his analyses and tries to show, that
"exist" has not merely SM, but UNIFIED semantic multiplicity. God
forbid that he breaks M. O. R., Modifed Occam’s Razor – Semantic multiplicies
are not to be multiplied unificatory necessity.”In “Metaphysics,” Aristotle
says that whatever things are signified by the "forms of
predication". Philosophers understood the forms of predication
(praedicabilium, praedicamentum) as a category. So in this way "being"
has as many significations as there are forms of predication. "Be" in
this case indicates what a thing is, what is like or how much it is and ctr.
And no reasons to make a difference between two utterances like "man walks
(flourishes)" and "the man is walking (flourishing)" – cfr.
Strawson on no need to have ‘be’ explicitly in the surface form, which render
some utterances absurd. Grice says that it is not a problem with interpretation
of verb-forms like ‘walks' and ‘flourishes' while we can replace them by expression
in a canonical form like ‘is walking' and ‘is flourishing'. Aristotle names
them as canonical in form within the multiplicity of use of "be"
because ‘is’ is not existential, but copulative.Cf. Descartes, I think
therefore I am – I am a res cogitans, ergo I am a res. "When Aristotle
says that predicates sometimes say what a thing is, sometimes what is it like
(its quality), sometimes how much it is (its quantity) and so on, he seems to
be saying that, if we consider the range of predicates which can be applied to
some item, for example to a substance like Socrates or a cow, these predicates
are categorically various, and so the uses of the copula in the ascription of
these predicates will undergo corresponding variation" It means that, from
Aristotle's point of view, "Socrates is F" is not an essential
predication, where "F" shows the item in the category C. So the
logical form of the proposition “Socrates is F” is understood as "Socrates
has something which is (C) F" where is (C) represent essential connection
to category C. In conclusion it can be said that the copula is a matter of the
logical nature of constant connection expressed by "has" and a
categorical variant relation expressed by essential "is". So we have
both types of interpretation: as existence and as a copula. (Our gratitude to
P. A. Sobolevsky). ases of ''Unified
Semantic Multiplicity'' (USM). Prominent among examples of USM is
the application of the word 'be'; according to. Aristotle, “being is said
in ... Aristotle and the alleged multiplicity of being (or
something). Grice is all for focal unity. Or, to echo Jones, if there is semantic
multiplicity (homonymy), it is in the
end UNIFIED semantic multiplicity (paronymy). Or something. Copula – H. P.
Grice on Aristotle on the copula (“Aristotle on the multiplicity of being”) --
copula, in logic, a form of the verb ‘to be’ that joins subject and predicate
in singular and categorical propositions. In ‘George is wealthy’ and ‘Swans are
beautiful’, e.g., ‘is’ and ‘are’, respectively, are copulas. Not all
occurrences of forms of ‘be’ count as copulas. In sentences such as ‘There are
51 states’, ‘are’ is not a copula, since it does not join a subject and a
predicate, but occurs simply as a part of the quantifier term ‘there are’.
corpus: -- Grice’s alma mater – he later
became a Hamsworth scholar at Merton and finally fellow of St. John’s.. Grice
would not have gone to Oxford had his talent not been in the classics, Greek
and Latin. As a Midlander, he was sent to Corpus. At the time, most of Oxford
was oriented towards the classics, or Lit. Hum. (Philosophia). At some point,
each college attained some stereotypical fame, which Grice detested (“Corpus is
for classicists”). By this time, Grice, after a short stay at Merton, accepted
the fellowship at St. John’s, which was “a different animal.” In them days,
there were only two tutorial fellows in philosophy, Scots Mabbott, and English
Grice. But Grice also was “University Lecturer in Philosophy,” which meant he
delivered seminars for tutees all over Oxford. St. John’s keeps a record of all
the tutees by Grice. They include, alphabetically, a few good names. Why is
Corpus so special? Find out! History of “Corpus Christi.” Cf. St. John’s. Cf.
Merton. Each should have an entry. Corpus is Grice’s alma mater – so crucial. Hardieian: you only have one tutor in your life, and Grice’s
was Hardie. So an exploration on Hardie may be in order. Grice hastens to add
that he only learned ‘form,’ not matter, from Hardie, but the ethical and
Aristotelian approach he also admitted. Corpus -- Grice, “Personal identity” –
soul and body -- disembodiment, the immaterial state of existence of a person
who previously had a body. Disembodiment is thus to be distinguished from
nonembodiment or immateriality. God and angels, if they exist, are
non-embodied, or immaterial. By contrast, if human beings continue to exist
after their bodies die, then they are disembodied. As this example suggests,
disembodiment is typically discussed in the context of immortality or survival
of death. It presupposes a view according to which persons are souls or some
sort of immaterial entity that is capable of existing apart from a body.
Whether it is possible for a person to become disembodied is a matter of
controversy. Most philosophers who believe that this is possible assume that a
disembodied person is conscious, but it is not obvious that this should be the
case. Corpus -- Grice’s body --
embodiment, the bodily aspects of human subjectivity. Embodiment is the central
theme in European phenomenology, with its most extensive treatment in the works
of Maurice MerleauPonty. Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment distinguishes
between “the objective body,” which is the body regarded as a physiological
entity, and “the phenomenal body,” which is not just some body, some particular
physiological entity, but my or your body as I or you experience it. Of course,
it is possible to experience one’s own body as a physiological entity. But this
is not typically the case. Typically, I experience my body tacitly as a unified
potential or capacity for doing this and that
typing this sentence, scratching that itch, etc. Moreover, this sense
that I have of my own motor capacities expressed, say, as a kind of bodily
confidence does not depend on an understanding of the physiological processes
involved in performing the action in question. The distinction between the
objective and phenomenal body is central to understanding the phenomenological
treatment of embodiment. Embodiment is not a concept that pertains to the body
grasped as a physiological entity. Rather it pertains to the phenomenal body
and to the role it plays in our object-directed experiences.
cosmologicum. Grice systematized metaphysics quite carefully. He
distinguished between eschatology (or the theory of categories) and ontology
proper. Within ontology, there is ‘ontologia generalis’ and ‘ontologia
specialis.’ There are at least two branches of ‘ontologia specialis’:
‘cosmologia’ and ‘anthropologia.’ Grice would often refer to the ‘world’ in
toto. For example, in “Meaning revisited,” when he speaks of the ‘triangle’:
world-denotatum; signum-emissor, and soul. Grice was never a solipsist, and
most of his theories are ‘causal’ in nature, including that of meaning and
perception. As such, he was constantly fighting against acosmism. While not one
of his twelve labours, he took a liking for the coinage. ‘Acosmism’ is formed
in analogy to ‘atheism,’ meaning the denial of the ultimate reality of the
world. Ernst Platner used it in 1776 to describe Spinoza’s philosophy, arguing
that Spinoza did not intend to deny “the existence of the Godhead, but the
existence of the world.” Maimon, Fichte, Hegel, and others make the same claim.
By the time of Feuerbach it was also used to characterize a basic feature of
Christianity: the denial of the world or worldliness. Cosmologicum -- emanationism, a doctrine
about the origin and ontological structure of the world, most frequently
associated with Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, according to which everything
else that exists is an emanation from a primordial unity, called by Plotinus
“the One.” The first product of emanation from the One is Intelligence noûs, a
realm resembling Plato’s world of Forms. From Intelligence emanates Soul
psuche, conceived as an active principle that imposes, insofar as that is
possible, the rational structure of Intelligence on the matter that emanates
from Soul. The process of emanation is typically conceived to be necessary and
timeless: although Soul, for instance, proceeds from Intelligence, the notion
of procession is one of logical dependence rather than temporal sequence. The
One remains unaffected and undiminished by emanation: Plotinus likens the One
to the sun, which necessarily emits light from its naturally infinite abundance
without suffering change or loss of its own substance. Although emanationism
influenced some Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers, it was incompatible
with those theistic doctrines of divine activity that maintained that God’s
creative choice and the world thus created were contingent, and that God can,
if he chooses, interact directly with individual creatures.
cotton onto the implicaturum:
this is not cognate with the plant. It’s Welsh, rather.Strawson’s and Wiggins’s
example of the ‘suggestio falsi’ – or alternative to Grice’s tutee example.
Since Strawson and Wiggins are presenting the thing to the ultra-prestigious
British Academy, they thought a ‘tutee’ example would not be prestigious
enough. So they have two philosophers, Strawson and Grice, talking about a
third party, another philosopher, well known by his mood outbursts. They are
assessing the third party’s philosophical abilities at their London club.
Strawson volunteers: “And Smith?”. Grice responds: “If he had a more angelic
temperament…” Strawson, “like a fool, I rushed in – Strawson Wiggins p. 520. The
angelic temperament. To like someone or something; to view someone or something
favorably. ... After we explained our plan again, the rest of the group
seemed to cotton onto it.
2. To begin to understand something. Has nothing to do with cotton 1560s,
"to prosper, succeed;" of things, "to agree, suit, fit," a
word of uncertain origin. Perhaps from Welsh cytuno "consent,
agree;" but perhaps rather a metaphor from cloth-finishing and thus
from cotton (n.).
Hensleigh Wedgwood compares cot "a fleece of wool matted together."
Meaning "become closely or intimately associated (with)," is from
1805 via the sense of "to get along together" (of persons), attested
from c. 1600. Related: Cottoned; cottoning.
craig: Grice loved his interpolation
theorem, a theorem for firstorder logic: if a sentence y of first-order logic
entails a sentence q there is an “interpolant,” a sentence F in the vocabulary
common to q and y that entails q and is entailed by y. Originally, William
Craig proved his theorem in 7 as a lemma, to give a simpler proof of Beth’s
definability theorem, but the result now stands on its own. In abstract model
theory, logics for which an interpolation theorem holds are said to have the
Craig interpolation property. Craig’s interpolation theorem shows that
first-order logic is closed under implicit definability, so that the concepts
embodied in first-order logic are all given explicitly. In the philosophy of
science literature ‘Craig’s theorem’ usually refers to another result of
Craig’s: that any recursively enumerable set of sentences of first-order logic
can be axiomatized. This has been used to argue that theoretical terms are in
principle eliminable from empirical theories. Assuming that an empirical theory
can be axiomatized in first-order logic, i.e., that there is a recursive set of
first-order sentences from which all theorems of the theory can be proven, it
follows that the set of consequences of the axioms in an “observational”
sublanguage is a recursively enumerable set. Thus, by Craig’s theorem, there is
a set of axioms for this subtheory, the Craig-reduct, that contains only
observation terms. Interestingly, the Craig-reduct theory may be semantically
weaker, in the sense that it may have models that cannot be extended to a model
of the full theory. The existence of such a model would prove that the
theoretical terms cannot all be defined on the basis of the observational
vocabulary only, a result related to Beth’s definability theorem.
crazy-bayesy: cited by H. P.
Grice, “Aspects of reason.” Bayesian rationality, minimally, a property a
system of beliefs or the believer has in virtue of the system’s “conforming to
the probability calculus.” “Bayesians” differ on what “rationality” requires,
but most agree that i beliefs come in degrees of firmness; ii these “degrees of
belief” are theoretically or ideally quantifiable; iii such quantification can
be understood in terms of person-relative, time-indexed “credence functions”
from appropriate sets of objects of belief propositions or sentences each set closed under at least finite
truth-functional combinations into the
set of real numbers; iv at any given time t, a person’s credence function at t
ought to be usually: “on pain of a Dutch book argument” a probability function;
that is, a mapping from the given set into the real numbers in such a way that
the “probability” the value assigned to any given object A in the set is
greater than or equal to zero, and is equal to unity % 1 if A is a necessary
truth, and, for any given objects A and B in the set, if A and B are incompatible
the negation of their conjunction is a necessary truth then the probability
assigned to their disjunction is equal to the sum of the probabilities assigned
to each; so that the usual propositional probability axioms impose a sort of
logic on degrees of belief. If a credence function is a probability function,
then it or the believer at the given time is “coherent.” On these matters, on
conditional degrees of belief, and on the further constraint on rationality
many Bayesians impose that change of belief ought to accord with
“conditionalization”, the reader should consult John Earman, Bayes or Bust? A
Critical Examination of Bayesian Confirmation Theory 2; Colin Howson and Peter
Urbach, Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach 9; and Richard Jeffrey, The
Logic of Decision 5. Bayes’s theorem,
any of several relationships between prior and posterior probabilities or odds,
especially 13 below. All of these depend upon the basic relationship 0 between
contemporaneous conditional and unconditional probabilities. Non-Bayesians
think these useful only in narrow ranges of cases, generally because of
skepticism about accessibility or significance of priors. According to 1,
posterior probability is prior probability times the “relevance quotient”
Carnap’s term. According to 2, posterior odds are Bayesian Bayes’s theorem
74 74 prior odds times the “likelihood
ratio” R. A. Fisher’s term. Relationship 3 comes from 1 by expanding P data via
the law of total probability. Bayes’s rule 4 for updating probabilities has you
set your new unconditional probabilities equal to your old conditional ones
when fresh certainty about data leaves probabilities conditionally upon the
data unchanged. The corresponding rule 5 has you do the same for odds. In
decision theory the term is used differently, for the rule “Choose so as to
maximize expectation of utility.”
Credible – by speaking of
probability and credibility, Grice is going modal! credibility: While Grice uses ‘probability’ as the correlatum of
desirability, he suggests ‘credibility’ is a better choice. It relates to the
‘creditum.’ Now, what is the generic for ‘trust’ when it comes to the creditum
and the desideratum? An indicative utterance expresses a belief. The utterer is
candid if he holds that belief. “Candid” applies to imperative utterances which
express genuine desires and notably the emissor’s intention that his recipient
will form a ‘desideratum.’ Following
Jeffrey and Davidson, respectively, Grice uses ‘desirability’ and
‘probability,’ but sometimes ‘credibibility,’ realizing that ‘credibility’ is
more symmetrical with ‘desirability’ than ‘probability’ is. Urmson had explored
this in “Parenthetical verbs.” Urmson co-relates, ‘certaintly’ with ‘know’ and
‘probably’ with ‘believe.’ But Urmson adds four further adverbs: “knowingly,”
“unknowingly,” “believably,” and “unbelievably.” Urmson also includes three
more: “uncredibly,” in variation with “incredibly,” and ‘credibly.” The keyword
should be ‘credibility.’
creditum: The Romans were good at this. Notably in negative
contexts. They distinguished between an emissor being fallax and being mendax.
It all has to do with ‘creditum.’ “Creditum’ is vero, more or less along
correspondence-theoretical lines. Used by Grice for the doxastic equivalent of
the buletic or desideratum. A creditum is an implicaturum, as Grice defines the
implicaturum of the content that an addresse has to assume the utterer BELIEVES
to deem him rational. The ‘creditum’-condition is essential for Grice in his
‘exhibitive’ account to the communication. By uttering “Smoke!”, U means that
there is some if the utterer intends that his addressee BELIEVE that he, the
utterer, is in a state of soul which has the propositional complex there is
smoke. It is worth noting that BELIEF is not needed for the immediate state of
the utterer’s soul: this can always be either a desire or a belief. But a
belief is REQUIRED as the immediate (if not ultimate) response intended by the
utterer that his addressee adapt. It is curious that given the primacy that
Grice held of the desirability over the credibility that many of his
conversational maxims are formulated as imperatives aimed at matters of belief,
conditions and value of credibility, probability and adequate evidence. In the
cases where Grice emphasizes ‘information,’ which one would associate with
‘belief,’ this association may be dropped provided the exhibitive account: you
can always influence or be influenced by others in the institution of a common
decision provided you give and receive the optimal information, or rather,
provided the conversationalists assume that they are engaged in a MAXIMAL
exchange of information. That ‘information’ does not necessarily apply to ‘belief’
is obvious in how complicated an order can get, “Get me a bottle”. “Is that
all?” “No, get me a bottle and make sure that it is of French wine, and add
something to drink the wine with, and drive careful, and give my love to
Rosie.” No belief is explicitly transmitted, yet the order seems informative
enough. Grice sometimes does use ‘informative’ in a strict context involving
credibility. He divides the mode of credibility into informational (when
addressed to others) and indicative (when addressed to self), for in a
self-addressed utterance such as, “I am being silly,” one cannot intend to
inform oneself of something one already knows! The English have ‘credibility’
and belief,
which is cognate with ‘love.’ H. P. Grice, “Disposition and belief,” H. P.
Grice, “Knowledge and belief.” a dispositional psychological state in virtue of
which a person will assent to a proposition under certain conditions.
Propositional knowledge, traditionally understood, entails belief. A behavioral
view implies that beliefs are just dispositions to behave in certain ways. Your
believing that the stove is hot is just your being disposed to act in a manner
appropriate to its being hot. The problem is that our beliefs, including their
propositional content indicated by a “that”-clause, typically explain why we do
what we do. You avoid touching the stove because you believe that it’s
dangerously hot. Explaining action via beliefs refers indispensably to
propositional content, but the behavioral view does not accommodate this. A state-object
view implies that belief consists of a special relation between a psychological
state and an object of belief, what is believed. The objects of belief,
traditionally understood, are abstract propositions existing independently of
anyone’s thinking of them. The state of believing is a propositional attitude
involving some degree of confidence toward a propositional object of belief.
Such a view allows that two persons, even separated by a long period of time,
can believe the same thing. A state-object view allows that beliefs be
dispositional rather than episodic, since they can exist while no action is
occurring. Such a view grants, however, that one can have a disposition to act
owing to believing something. Regarding mental action, a belief typically
generates a disposition to assent, at least under appropriate circumstances, to
the proposition believed. Given the central role of propositional content,
however, a state-object view denies that beliefs are just dispositions to act.
In addition, such a view should distinguish between dispositional believing and
a mere disposition to believe. One can be merely disposed to believe many
things that one does not actually believe, owing to one’s lacking the
appropriate psychological attitude to relevant propositional content. Beliefs
are either occurrent or non-occurrent. Occurrent belief, unlike non-occurrent
belief, requires current assent to the proposition believed. If the assent is
self-conscious, the belief is an explicit occurrent belief; if the assent is
not self-conscious, the belief is an implicit occurrent behaviorism,
supervenient belief 78 78 belief.
Non-occurrent beliefs permit that we do not cease to believe that 2 ! 2 % 4,
for instance, merely because we now happen to be thinking of something else or
nothing at all. . -- belief revision,
the process by which cognitive states change in light of new information. This
topic looms large in discussions of Bayes’s Theorem and other approaches in
decision theory. The reasons prompting belief revision are characteristically
epistemic; they concern such notions as quality of evidence and the tendency to
yield truths. Many different rules have been proposed for updating one’s belief
set. In general, belief revision typically balances risk of error against
information increase. Belief revision is widely thought to proceed either by
expansion or by conceptual revision. Expansion occurs in virtue of new
observations; a belief is changed, or a new belief established, when a
hypothesis or provisional belief is supported by evidence whose probability is
high enough to meet a favored criterion of epistemic warrant. The hypothesis
then becomes part of the existing belief corpus, or is sufficient to prompt
revision. Conceptual revision occurs when appropriate changes are made in
theoretical assumptions in accordance
with such principles as simplicity and explanatory or predictive power by which the corpus is organized. In actual
cases, we tend to revise beliefs with an eye toward advancing the best
comprehensive explanation in the relevant cognitive domain.
cremonini: essential
Italian philosopher. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Cremonini," per
Il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria,
Italia.
Grice’s criterion for the implicaturum, --
cf. G. P. Baker, “Grice and criterial semantics” -- broadly, a sufficient
condition for the presence of a certain property or for the truth of a certain
proposition. Generally, a criterion need be sufficient merely in normal
circumstances rather than absolutely sufficient. Typically, a criterion is
salient in some way, often by virtue of being a necessary condition as well as
a sufficient one. The plural form, ‘criteria’, is commonly used for a set of
singly necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. A set of truth conditions
is said to be criterial for the truth of propositions of a certain form. A
conceptual analysis of a philosophically important concept may take the form of
a proposed set of truth conditions for paradigmatic propositions containing the
concept in question. Philosophers have proposed criteria for such notions as meaningfulness,
intentionality,
creationism, theological criterion knowledge, justification, justice,
rightness, and identity including personal identity and event identity, among
many others. There is a special use of the term in connection with Vitters’s
well-known remark that “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria,”
e.g., moans and groans for aches and pains. The suggestion is that a criteriological
connection is needed to forge a conceptual link between items of a sort that
are intelligible and knowable to items of a sort that, but for the connection,
would not be intelligible or knowable. A mere symptom cannot provide such a
connection, for establishing a correlation between a symptom and that for which
it is a symptom presupposes that the latter is intelligible and knowable. One
objection to a criteriological view, whether about aches or quarks, is that it
clashes with realism about entities of the sort in question and lapses into, as
the case may be, behaviorism or instrumentalism. For it seems that to posit a
criteriological connection is to suppose that the nature and existence of
entities of a given sort can depend on the conditions for their intelligibility
or knowability, and that is to put the epistemological cart before the
ontological horse.
critical legal studies: explored by Grice
in his analysis of legal vs. moral right --
a loose assemblage of legal writings and thinkers in the United States
and Great Britain since the mid-0s that aspire to a jurisprudence and a
political ideology. Like the legal
realists of the 0s and 0s, the jurisprudential program is largely negative,
consisting in the discovery of supposed contradictions within both the law as a
whole and areas of law such as contracts and criminal law. The jurisprudential
implication derived from such supposed contradictions within the law is that
any decision in any case can be defended as following logically from some authoritative
propositions of law, making the law completely without guidance in particular
cases. Also like the legal realists, the
political ideology of critical legal studies is vaguely leftist, embracing the
communitarian critique of liberalism. Communitarians fault liberalism for its
alleged overemphasis on individual rights and individual welfare at the expense
of the intrinsic value of certain collective goods. Given the cognitive
relativism of many of its practitioners, critical legal studies tends not to
aspire to have anything that could be called a theory of either law or of
politics.
Grice’s
critique of conversational reason – “What does Kant mean by ‘critique’?
Should he?” – Grice. Critical Realism, a philosophy that at the highest level
of generality purports to integrate the positive insights of both New Realism
and idealism. New Realism was the first wave of realistic reaction to the
dominant idealism of the nineteenth century. It was a version of immediate and
direct realism. In its attempt to avoid any representationalism that would lead
to idealism, this tradition identified the immediate data of consciousness with
objects in the physical world. There is no intermediary between the knower and
the known. This heroic tour de force foundered on the phenomena of error,
illusion, and perceptual variation, and gave rise to a successor realism Critical Realism that acknowledged the mediation of “the
mental” in our cognitive grasp of the physical world. ’Critical Realism’ was
the title of a work in epistemology by Roy Wood Sellars 6, but its more general
use to designate the broader movement derives from the 0 cooperative volume,
Essays in Critical Realism: A Cooperative Study of the Problem of Knowledge,
containing position papers by Durant Drake, A. O. Lovejoy, J. B. Pratt, A. K.
Rogers, C. A. Strong, George Santayana, and Roy Wood Sellars. With New Realism,
Critical Realism maintains that the primary object of knowledge is the
independent physical world, and that what is immediately present to
consciousness is not the physical object as such, but some corresponding mental
state broadly construed. Whereas both New Realism and idealism grew out of the
conviction that any such mediated account of knowledge is untenable, the
Critical Realists felt that only if knowledge of the external world is
explained in terms of a process of mental mediation, can error, illusion, and
perceptual variation be accommodated. One could fashion an account of mental
mediation that did not involve the pitfalls of Lockean representationalism by
carefully distinguishing between the object known and the mental state through
which it is known. The Critical Realists differed among themselves both
epistemologically and metaphysically. The mediating elements in cognition were
variously construed as essences, ideas, or sensedata, and the precise role of
these items in cognicriterion, problem of the Critical Realism tion was again variously construed.
Metaphysically, some were dualists who saw knowledge as unexplainable in terms
of physical processes, whereas others principally Santayana and Sellars were
materialists who saw cognition as simply a function of conscious biological
systems. The position of most lasting influence was probably that of Sellars
because that torch was taken up by his son, Wilfrid, whose very sophisticated
development of it was quite influential.
-- critical theory, any social theory that is at the same time
explanatory, normative, practical, and self-reflexive. The term was first
developed by Horkheimer as a self-description of the Frankfurt School and its
revision of Marxism. It now has a wider significance to include any critical,
theoretical approach, including feminism and liberation philosophy. When they
make claims to be scientific, such approaches attempt to give rigorous
explanations of the causes of oppression, such as ideological beliefs or
economic dependence; these explanations must in turn be verified by empirical
evidence and employ the best available social and economic theories. Such explanations
are also normative and critical, since they imply negative evaluations of
current social practices. The explanations are also practical, in that they
provide a better self-understanding for agents who may want to improve the
social conditions that the theory negatively evaluates. Such change generally
aims at “emancipation,” and theoretical insight empowers agents to remove
limits to human freedom and the causes of human suffering. Finally, these
theories must also be self-reflexive: they must account for their own
conditions of possibility and for their potentially transformative effects.
These requirements contradict the standard account of scientific theories and
explanations, particularly positivism and its separation of fact and value. For
this reason, the methodological writings of critical theorists often attack
positivism and empiricism and attempt to construct alternative epistemologies.
Critical theorists also reject relativism, since the cultural relativity of
norms would undermine the basis of critical evaluation of social practices and
emancipatory change. The difference between critical and non-critical theories
can be illustrated by contrasting the Marxian and Mannheimian theories of
ideology. Whereas Mannheim’s theory merely describes relations between ideas of
social conditions, Marx’s theory tries to show how certain social practices
require false beliefs about them by their participants. Marx’s theory not only
explains why this is so, it also negatively evaluates those practices; it is
practical in that by disillusioning participants, it makes them capable of
transformative action. It is also self-reflexive, since it shows why some
practices require illusions and others do not, and also why social crises and
conflicts will lead agents to change their circumstances. It is scientific, in
that it appeals to historical evidence and can be revised in light of better
theories of social action, language, and rationality. Marx also claimed that
his theory was superior for its special “dialectical method,” but this is now
disputed by most critical theorists, who incorporate many different theories
and methods. This broader definition of critical theory, however, leaves a gap
between theory and practice and places an extra burden on critics to justify
their critical theories without appeal to such notions as inevitable historical
progress. This problem has made critical theories more philosophical and
concerned with questions of justification.
Grice’s
critters:
one is never sure if Grice uses ‘creature’ seriously! creation ex nihilo, the
act of bringing something into existence from nothing. According to traditional
Christian theology, God created the world ex nihilo. To say that the world was
created from nothing does not mean that there was a prior non-existent
substance out of which it was fashioned, but rather that there was not anything
out of which God brought it into being. However, some of the patristics
influenced by Plotinus, such as Gregory of Nyssa, apparently understood
creation ex nihilo to be an emanation from God according to which what is
created comes, not from nothing, but from God himself. Not everything that God
makes need be created ex nihilo; or if, as in Genesis 2: 7, 19, God made a
human being and animals from the ground, a previously existing material, God
did not create them from nothing. Regardless of how bodies are made, orthodox
theology holds that human souls are created ex nihilo; the opposing view,
traducianism, holds that souls are propagated along with bodies. creationism, acceptance of the early chapters
of Genesis taken literally. Genesis claims that the universe and all of its
living creatures including humans were created by God in the space of six days.
The need to find some way of reconciling this story with the claims of science
intensified in the nineteenth century, with the publication of Darwin’s Origin
of Species 1859. In the Southern states of the United States, the indigenous
form of evangelical Protestant Christianity declared total opposition to evolutionism,
refusing any attempt at reconciliation, and affirming total commitment to a
literal “creationist” reading of the Bible. Because of this, certain states
passed laws banning the teaching of evolutionism. More recently, literalists
have argued that the Bible can be given full scientific backing, and they have
therefore argued that “Creation science” may properly be taught in
state-supported schools in the United States without violation of the
constitutional separation of church and state. This claim was challenged in the
state of Arkansas in 1, and ultimately rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. The
creationism dispute has raised some issues of philosophical interest and
importance. Most obviously, there is the question of what constitutes a genuine
science. Is there an adequate criterion of demarcation between science and
nonscience, and will it put evolutionism on the one side and creationism on the
other? Some philosophers, arguing in the spirit of Karl Popper, think that such
a criterion can be found. Others are not so sure; and yet others think that
some such criterion can be found, but shows creationism to be genuine science,
albeit already proven false. Philosophers of education have also taken an
interest in creationism and what it represents. If one grants that even the
most orthodox science may contain a value component, reflecting and influencing
its practitioners’ culture, then teaching a subject like biology almost
certainly is not a normatively neutral enterprise. In that case, without necessarily
conceding to the creationist anything about the true nature of science or
values, perhaps one must agree that science with its teaching is not something
that can and should be set apart from the rest of society, as an entirely
distinct phenomenon.
Croce
– Grice: “I would think the fashionable Englishwoman may think Croce is the
most important philosopher that ever lived!” -- vide under “Grice as Croceian”
-- Grice as Croceian:
expression and intention -- Croce, B., philosopher. He was born at
Pescasseroli, in the Abruzzi, and after 6 lived in Naples. He briefly attended
the of Rome and was led to study
Herbart’s philosophy. In 4 he founded the influential journal La critica. In 0
he was made life member of the senate.
Early in his career he befriended Giovanni Gentile, but this friendship was
breached by Gentile’s Fascism. During the Fascist period and World War II Croce
lived in isolation as the chief anti-fascist thinker in Italy. He later became
a leader of the Liberal party and at the age of eighty founded the Institute
for Historical Studies. Croce was a literary and historical scholar who joined
his great interest in these fields to philosophy. His best-known work in the Englishspeaking
world is Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic 2. This was
the first part of his “Philosophy of Spirit”; the second was his Logic 5, the
third his theory of the Practical 9, and the fourth his Historiography 7. Croce
was influenced by Hegel and the Hegelian aesthetician Francesco De Sanctis
181783 and by Vico’s conceptions of knowledge, history, and society. He wrote
The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico 1 and a famous commentary on Hegel, What Is
Living and What Is critical theory Croce, Benedetto Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel 7, in
which he advanced his conception of the “dialectic of distincts” as more
fundamental than the Hegelian dialectic of opposites. Croce held that philosophy
always springs from the occasion, a view perhaps rooted in his concrete studies
of history. He accepted the general Hegelian identification of philosophy with
the history of philosophy. His philosophy originates from his conception of
aesthetics. Central to his aesthetics is his view of intuition, which evolved
through various stages during his career. He regards aesthetic experience as a
primitive type of cognition. Intuition involves an awareness of a particular
image, which constitutes a non-conceptual form of knowledge. Art is the expression
of emotion but not simply for its own sake. The expression of emotion can
produce cognitive awareness in the sense that the particular intuited as an
image can have a cosmic aspect, so that in it the universal human spirit is
perceived. Such perception is present especially in the masterpieces of world
literature. Croce’s conception of aesthetic has connections with Kant’s
“intuition” Anschauung and to an extent with Vico’s conception of a primordial
form of thought based in imagination fantasia. Croce’s philosophical idealism
includes fully developed conceptions of logic, science, law, history, politics,
and ethics. His influence to date has been largely in the field of aesthetics
and in historicist conceptions of knowledge and culture. His revival of Vico
has inspired a whole school of Vico scholarship. Croce’s conception of a
“Philosophy of Spirit” showed it was possible to develop a post-Hegelian
philosophy that, with Hegel, takes “the true to be the whole” but which does
not simply imitate Hegel. Croce --
expression theory of art, a theory that defines art as the expression of
feelings or emotion sometimes called expressionism in art. Such theories first
acquired major importance in the nineteenth century in connection with the rise
of Romanticism. Expression theories are as various as the different views about
what counts as expressing emotion. There are four main variants. 1 Expression
as communication. This requires that the artist actually have the feelings that
are expressed, when they are initially expressed. They are “embodied” in some
external form, and thereby transmitted to the perceiver. Leo Tolstoy 18280 held
a view of this sort. 2 Expression as intuition. An intuition is the
apprehension of the unity and individuality of something. An intuition is “in
the mind,” and hence the artwork is also. Croce held this view, and in his
later work argued that the unity of an intuition is established by feeling. 3
Expression as clarification. An artist starts out with vague, undefined
feelings, and expression is a process of coming to clarify, articulate, and
understand them. This view retains Croce’s idea that expression is in the
artist’s mind, as well as explanation, covering law expression theory of art
299 299 his view that we are all
artists to the degree that we articulate, clarify, and come to understand our
own feelings. Collingwood held this view. 4 Expression as a property of the
object. For an artwork to be an expression of emotion is for it to have a given
structure or form. Suzanne K. Langer 55 argued that music and the other arts
“presented” or exhibited structures or forms of feeling in general.
Grice’s
crucial experiment:
a means of deciding between rival theories (or arguments) for this or that
impicatum, that, providing parallel explanations of large classes of phenomena,
come to be placed at issue by a single fact. For example, the Newtonian
emission theory predicts that light travels faster in water than in air;
according to the wave theory, light travels slower in water than in air.
Dominique François Arago proposed a crucial experiment comparing the respective
velocities. Léon Foucault then devised an apparatus to measure the speed of
light in various media and found a lower velocity in water than in air. Arago
and Foucault concluded for the wave theory, believing that the experiment
refuted the emission theory. Other examples include Galileo’s discovery of the
phases of Venus Ptolemaic versus Copernican astronomy, Pascal’s Puy-de-Dôme
experiment with the barometer vacuists versus plenists, Fresnel’s prediction of
a spot of light in circular shadows particle versus wave optics, and
Eddington’s measurement of the gravitational bending of light rays during a
solar eclipse Newtonian versus Einsteinian gravitation. At issue in crucial experiments
is usually a novel prediction. The notion seems to derive from Francis Bacon,
whose New Organon 1620 discusses the “Instance of the Fingerpost Instantia later experimentum crucis,” a term borrowed from the post set up
at crossroads to indicate several directions. Crucial experiments were
emphasized in early nineteenth-century scientific methodology e.g., in John F. Herschel’s A Preliminary
Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy 1830. Duhem argued that crucial
experiments resemble false dilemmas: hypotheses in physics do not come in
pairs, so that crucial experiments cannot transform one of the two into a
demonstrated truth. Discussing Foucault’s experiment, Duhem asks whether we
dare assert that no other hypothesis is imaginable and suggests that instead of
light being either a simple particle or wave, light might be something else,
perhaps a disturbance propagated within a dielectric medium, as theorized by
Maxwell. In the twentieth century, crucial experiments and novel predictions figured
prominently in the work of Imre Lakatos 274. Agreeing that crucial experiments
are unable to overthrow theories, Lakatos accepted them as retroactive
indications of the fertility or progress of research programs.
CUM-substantia -- co-substantia:
homoousios.
Athanasius -- early Christian father, bishop, and a leading protagonist in the
disputes concerning Christ’s relationship to God. Through major works like On
the Incarnation, Against the Arians, and Letters on the Holy Spirit, Athanasius
contributed greatly to the classical doctrines of the Incarnation and the
Trinity. Opposing all forms of Arianism, which denies Christ’s divinity and
reduced him to what Grice would call a “creature,” Athanasius teaches, in the
language of the Nicene Creed, that Christ the Son, and likewise the Holy
Spirit, are of the same being as God the Father, cosubstantialis, “homoousios.”
Thus with terminology and concepts drawn from Grecian and Graeco-Roman
philosophy, Athanasius helps to forge the distinctly Christian and un-Hellenistic
doctrine of the eternal tri-une God (“credo quia absurdum est”) who became
enfleshed in time and matter and restored humanity to immortality, forfeited
through sin, by involvement in its condition of corruption and decay.
Homoousios (Greek, ‘of the same substance’), a concept central to the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity, enshrined in the Nicene Creed (Nicaea, “Holy, Holy,
Holy”). It attests that God the Son (and by extension the Spirit) is of one and
the same being or substance (ousia) as the Father. Reflecting the insistence of
Athanasius against Arianism that Christ is God’s eternal, co-equal Son and not
a “creature,” as Grice uses the term, the Nicene “homoousios” is also to be
differentiated from a rival formula, “homoiousios” (Grecian, ‘of SIMILAR
substance’), which affirms merely the Son’s LIKENESS in being to God. Though
notoriously and superficially an argument over one Greek iota, the issue was
philosophically profound and crucial whether or not Jesus of Nazareth
incarnated God’s own being, revealed God’s own truth, and mediated God’s own
salvation. If x=x, x is like x. A horse is like a horse. Grice on implicaturum.
“There is only an implicaturum to the effect that if a horse is a horse a horse
is not like a horse.” “Similarly for Christ and God.” Cicero saw this when he
philosophised on ‘idem’ and ‘similis.’
cumberland -- Law – Grice was
obsessed with laws that would introduce psychological concepts -- Cumberland,
R. English philosopher and bishop. He wrote a Latin Treatise of the Laws of
Nature 1672, tr. twice into English and once into . Admiring Grotius,
Cumberland hoped to refute Hobbes in the interests of defending Christian
morality and religion. He refused to appeal to innate ideas and a priori
arguments because he thought Hobbes must be attacked on his own ground. Hence
he offered a reductive and naturalistic account of natural law. The one basic
moral law of nature is that the pursuit of the good of all rational beings is
the best path to the agent’s own good. This is true because God made nature so
that actions aiding others are followed by beneficial consequences to the
agent, while those harmful to others harm the agent. Since the natural
consequences of actions provide sanctions that, once we know them, will make us
act for the good of others, we can conclude that there is a divine law by which
we are obligated to act for the common good. And all the other laws of nature
follow from the basic law. Cumberland refused to discuss free will, thereby
suggesting a view of human action as fully determined by natural causes. If on
his theory it is a blessing that God made nature including humans to work as it
does, the religious reader must wonder if there is any role left for God
concerning morality. Cumberland is generally viewed as a major forerunner of
utilitarianism.
inductum – Grice knew a lot
about induction theory via Kneale and Keynes -- curve-fitting problem, the
problem of making predictions from past observations by fitting curves to the
data. Curve fitting has two steps: first, select a family of curves; then, find
the bestfitting curve by some statistical criterion such as the method of least
squares e.g., choose the curve that has the least sum of squared deviations
between the curve and data. The method was first proposed by Adrian Marie
Legendre 17521833 and Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777 1855 in the early nineteenth
century as a way of inferring planetary trajectories from noisy data. More
generally, curve fitting may be used to construct low-level empirical
generalizations. For example, suppose that the ideal gas law, P % nkT, is
chosen as the form of the law governing the dependence of the pressure P on the
equilibrium temperature T of a fixed volume of gas, where n is the molecular
number per unit volume and k is Boltzmann’s constant a universal constant equal
to 1.3804 $ 10†16 erg°C†1. When the parameter nk is adjustable, the law
specifies a family of curves one for
each numerCudworth, Damaris curve-fitting problem ical value of the parameter. Curve fitting
may be used to determine the best-fitting member of the family, thereby
effecting a measurement of the theoretical parameter, nk. The philosophically
vexing problem is how to justify the initial choice of the form of the law. On
the one hand, one might choose a very large, complex family of curves, which
would ensure excellent fit with any data set. The problem with this option is
that the best-fitting curve may overfit the data. If too much attention is paid
to the random elements of the data, then the predictively useful trends and
regularities will be missed. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
On the other hand, simpler families run a greater risk of making grossly false
assumptions about the true form of the law. Intuitively, the solution is to
choose a simplefamily of curves that maintains a reasonable degree of fit. The
simplicity of a family of curves is measured by the paucity of parameters. The
problem is to say how and why such a trade-off between simplicity and goodness
of fit should be made. When a theory can accommodate recalcitrant data only by
the ad hoc i.e., improperly
motivated addition of new terms and
parameters, students of science have long felt that the subsequent increase in
the degree of fit should not count in the theory’s favor, and such additions
are sometimes called ad hoc hypotheses. The best-known example of this sort of
ad hoc hypothesizing is the addition of epicycles upon epicycles in the
planetary astronomies of Ptolemy and Copernicus. This is an example in which a
gain in fit need not compensate for the loss of simplicity. Contemporary
philosophers sometimes formulate the curve-fitting problem differently. They
often assume that there is no noise in the data, and speak of the problem of
choosing among different curves that fit the data exactly. Then the problem is to
choose the simplest curve from among all those curves that pass through every
data point. The problem is that there is no universally accepted way of
defining the simplicity of single curves. No matter how the problem is
formulated, it is widely agreed that simplicity should play some role in theory
choice. Rationalists have championed the curve-fitting problem as exemplifying
the underdetermination of theory from data and the need to make a priori
assumptions about the simplicity of nature. Those philosophers who think that
we have no such a priori knowledge still need to account for the relevance of
simplicity to science. Whewell described curve fitting as the colligation of
facts in the quantitative sciences, and the agreement in the measured parameters
coefficients obtained by different colligations of facts as the consilience of
inductions. Different colligations of facts say on the same gas at different
volume or for other gases may yield good agreement among independently measured
values of parameters like the molecular density of the gas and Boltzmann’s
constant. By identifying different parameters found to agree, we constrain the
form of the law without appealing to a priori knowledge good news for
empiricism. But the accompanying increase in unification also worsens the
overall degree of fit. Thus, there is also the problem of how and why we should
trade off unification with total degree of fit. Statisticians often refer to a
family of hypotheses as a model. A rapidly growing literature in statistics on
model selection has not yet produced any universally accepted formula for
trading off simplicity with degree of fit. However, there is wide agreement
among statisticians that the paucity of parameters is the appropriate way of
measuring simplicity.
Grice’s
defense of modernist logic -- cut-elimination theorem, a theorem stating that a
certain type of inference rule including a rule that corresponds to modus
ponens is not needed in classical logic. The idea was anticipated by J.
Herbrand; the theorem was proved by G. Gentzen and generalized by S. Kleene.
Gentzen formulated a sequent calculus
i.e., a deductive system with rules for statements about derivability.
It includes a rule that we here express as ‘From C Y D,M and M,C Y D, infer C Y
D’ or ‘Given that C yields D or M, and that C plus M yields D, we may infer
that C yields D’. Cusa cut-elimination theorem This is called the cut rule because it
cuts out the middle formula M. Gentzen showed that his sequent calculus is an
adequate formalization of the predicate logic, and that the cut rule can be
eliminated; anything provable with it can be proved without it. One important
consequence of this is that, if a formula F is provable, then there is a proof
of F that consists solely of subformulas of F. This fact simplifies the study
of provability. Gentzen’s methodology applies directly to classical logic but
can be adapted to many nonclassical logics, including some intuitionistic
logics. It has led to some important theorems about consistency, and has
illuminated the role of auxiliary assumptions in the derivation of consequences
from a theory.
cybernetic
implicaturum
– What Grice disliked about the cybernetic implicaturum is that it is
‘mechanisitically derivable” and thus not really ‘rational’ in the way an implicaturum
is meant to be rational. A machine cannot implicate. Grice “Method in
philosophical psychology” -- cybernetics coined by N. Wiener in 7 from Grecian
kubernetes, ‘helmsman’, the study of the communication and manipulation of
information in service of the control and guidance of biological, physical, or
chemical energy systems. Historically, cybernetics has been intertwined with
mathematical theories of information communication and computation. To describe
the cybernetic properties of systems or processes requires ways to describe and
measure information reduce uncertainty about events within the system and its
environment. Feedback and feedforward, the basic ingredients of cybernetic
processes, involve information as what
is fed forward or backward and are basic
to processes such as homeostasis in biological systems, automation in industry,
and guidance systems. Of course, their most comprehensive application is to the
purposive behavior thought of cognitively goal-directed systems such as
ourselves. Feedback occurs in closed-loop, as opposed to open-loop, systems.
Actually, ‘open-loop’ is a misnomer involving no loop, but it has become
entrenched. The standard example of an openloop system is that of placing a
heater with constant output in a closed room and leaving it switched on. Room
temperature may accidentally reach, but may also dramatically exceed, the
temperature desired by the occupants. Such a heating system has no means of
controlling itself to adapt to required conditions. In contrast, the standard
closed-loop system incorporates a feedback component. At the heart of
cybernetics is the concept of control. A controlled process is one in which an
end state that is reached depends essentially on the behavior of the controlling
system and not merely on its external environment. That is, control involves
partial independence for the system. A control system may be pictured as having
both an inner and outer environment. The inner environment consists of the
internal events that make up the system; the outer environment consists of
events that causally impinge on the system, threatening disruption and loss of
system integrity and stability. For a system to maintain its independence and
identity in the face of fluctuations in its external environment, it must be
able to detect information about those changes in the external environment.
Information must pass through the interface between inner and outer
environments, and the system must be able to compensate for fluctuations of the
outer environment by adjusting its own inner environmental variables.
Otherwise, disturbances in the outer environment will overcome the system bringing its inner states into equilibrium
with the outer states, thereby losing its identity as a distinct, independent
system. This is nowhere more certain than with the homeostatic systems of the
body for temperature or blood sugar levels. Control in the attainment of goals
is accomplished by minimizing error. Negative feedback, or information about
error, is the difference between activity a system actually performs output and
that activity which is its goal to perform input. The standard example of
control incorporating negative feedback is the thermostatically controlled
heating system. The actual room temperature system output carries information
to the thermostat that can be compared via goal-state comparator to the desired
temperature for the room input as embodied in the set-point on the thermostat;
a correction can then be made to minimize the difference error the furnace turns on or off. Positive
feedback tends to amplify the value of the output of a system or of a system
disturbance by adding the value of the output to the system input quantity.
Thus, the system accentuates disturbances and, if unchecked, will eventually
pass the brink of instability. Suppose that as room temperature rises it causes
the thermostatic set-point to rise in direct proportion to the rise in
temperature. This would cause the furnace to continue to output heat possibly
with disastrous consequences. Many biological maladies have just this
characteristic. For example, severe loss of blood causes inability of the heart
to pump effectively, which causes loss of arterial pressure, which, in turn,
causes reduced flow of blood to the heart, reducing pumping efficiency.
cybernetics cybernetics Cognitively
goal-directed systems are also cybernetic systems. Purposive attainment of a
goal by a goal-directed system must have at least: 1 an internal representation
of the goal state of the system a detector for whether the desired state is
actual; 2 a feedback loop by which information about the present state of the
system can be compared with the goal state as internally represented and by
means of which an error correction can be made to minimize any difference; and
3 a causal dependency of system output upon the error-correction process of
condition 2 to distinguish goal success from fortuitous goal satisfaction.
cynical
implicaturum,
Cynic -- a classical Grecian philosophical school characterized by asceticism
and emphasis on the sufficiency of virtue for happiness eudaimonia, boldness in
speech, and shamelessness in action. The Cynics were strongly influenced by
Socrates and were themselves an important influence on Stoic ethics. An ancient
tradition links the Cynics to Antisthenes c.445c.360 B.C., an Athenian. He
fought bravely in the battle of Tanagra and claimed that he would not have been
so courageous if he had been born of two Athenians instead of an Athenian and a
Thracian slave. He studied with Gorgias, but later became a close companion of
Socrates and was present at Socrates’ death. Antisthenes was proudest of his
wealth, although he had no money, because he was satisfied with what he had and
he could live in whatever circumstances he found himself. Here he follows
Socrates in three respects. First, Socrates himself lived with a disregard for
pleasure and pain e.g., walking barefoot
in snow. Second, Socrates thinks that in every circumstance a virtuous person
is better off than a nonvirtuous one; Antisthenes anticipates the Stoic
development of this to the view that virtue is sufficient for happiness,
because the virtuous person uses properly whatever is present. Third, both Socrates
and Antisthenes stress that the soul is more important than the body, and
neglect the body for the soul. Unlike the later Cynics, however, both Socrates
and Antisthenes do accept pleasure when it is available. Antisthenes also does
not focus exclusively on ethics; he wrote on other topics, including logic. He
supposedly told Plato that he could see a horse but not horseness, to which
Plato replied that he had not acquired the means to see horseness. Diogenes of
Sinope c.400c.325 B.C. continued the emphasis on self-sufficiency and on the
soul, but took the disregard for pleasure to asceticism. According to one
story, Plato called Diogenes “Socrates gone mad.” He came to Athens after being
exiled from Sinope, perhaps because the coinage was defaced, either by himself
or by others, under his father’s direction. He took ‘deface the coinage!’ as a
motto, meaning that the current standards were corrupt and should be marked as
corrupt by being defaced; his refusal to live by them was his defacing them. For
example, he lived in a wine cask, ate whatever scraps he came across, and wrote
approvingly of cannibalism and incest. One story reports that he carried a
lighted lamp in broad daylight looking for an honest human, probably intending
to suggest that the people he did see were so corrupted that they were no
longer really people. He apparently wanted to replace the debased standards of
custom with the genuine standards of nature
but nature in the sense of what was minimally required for human life,
which an individual human could achieve, without society. Because of this, he
was called a Cynic, from the Grecian word kuon dog, because he was as shameless
as a dog. Diogenes’ most famous successor was Crates fl. c.328325 B.C.. He was
a Boeotian, from Thebes, and renounced his wealth to become a Cynic. He seems
to have been more pleasant than Diogenes; according to some reports, every
Athenian house was open to him, and he was even regarded by them as a household
god. Perhaps the most famous incident involving Crates is his marriage to
Hipparchia, who took up the Cynic way of life despite her family’s opposition
and insisted that educating herself was preferable to working a loom. Like
Diogenes, Crates emphasized that happiness is self-sufficiency, and claimed that
asceticism is required for self-sufficiency; e.g., he advises us not to prefer
oysters to lentils. He argues that no one is happy if happiness is measured by
the balance of pleasure and pain, since in each period of our lives there is
more pain than pleasure. Cynicism continued to be active through the third
century B.C., and returned to prominence in the second century A.D. after an
apparent decline.
cyrenaic
implicaturum
-- Cyrenaics, a classical Grecian philosophical school that began shortly after
Socrates and lasted for several centuries, noted especially for hedonism.
Ancient writers trace the Cyrenaics back to Aristippus of Cyrene fifth-fourth
century B.C., an associate of Socrates. Aristippus came to Athens because of
Socrates’ fame and later greatly enjoyed the luxury of court life in Sicily.
Some people ascribe the founding of the school to his grandchild Aristippus,
because of an ancient report that the elder Aristippus said nothing clear about
the human end. The Cyrenaics include Aristippus’s child Arete, her child
Aristippus taught by Arete, Hegesius, Anniceris, and Theodorus. The school
seems to have been superseded by the Epicureans. No Cyrenaic writings survive,
and the reports we do have are sketchy. The Cyrenaics avoid mathematics and natural
philosophy, preferring ethics because of its utility. According to them, not
only will studying nature not make us virtuous, it also won’t make us stronger
or richer. Some reports claim that they also avoid logic and epistemology. But
this is not true of all the Cyrenaics: according to other reports, they think
logic and epistemology are useful, consider arguments and also causes as topics
to be covered in ethics, and have an epistemology. Their epistemology is
skeptical. We can know only how we are affected; we can know, e.g., that we are
whitening, but not that whatever is causing this sensation is itself white.
This differs from Protagoras’s theory; unlike Protagoras the Cyrenaics draw no
inferences about the things that affect us, claiming only that external things
have a nature that we cannot know. But, like Protagoras, the Cyrenaics base
their theory on the problem of conflicting appearances. Given their
epistemology, if humans ought to aim at something that is not a way of being
affected i.e., something that is immediately perceived according to them, we
can never know anything about it. Unsurprisingly, then, they claim that the end
is a way of being affected; in particular, they are hedonists. The end of good
actions is particular pleasures smooth changes, and the end of bad actions is
particular pains rough changes. There is also an intermediate class, which aims
at neither pleasure nor pain. Mere absence of pain is in this intermediate
class, since the absence of pain may be merely a static state. Pleasure for
Aristippus seems to be the sensation of pleasure, not including related psychic
states. We should aim at pleasure although not everyone does, as is clear from
our naturally seeking it as children, before we consciously choose to.
Happiness, which is the sum of the particular pleasures someone experiences, is
choiceworthy only for the particular pleasures that constitute it, while
particular pleasures are choiceworthy for themselves. Cyrenaics, then, are not
concerned with maximizing total pleasure over a lifetime, but only with
particular pleasures, and so they should not choose to give up particular
pleasures on the chance of increasing the total. Later Cyrenaics diverge in
important respects from the original Cyrenaic hedonism, perhaps in response to
the development of Epicurus’s views. Hegesias claims that happiness is
impossible because of the pains associated with the body, and so thinks of
happiness as total pleasure minus total pain. He emphasizes that wise people
act for themselves, and denies that people actually act for someone else.
Anniceris, on the other hand, claims that wise people are happy even if they
have few pleasures, and so seems to think of happiness as the sum of pleasures,
and not as the excess of pleasures over pains. Anniceris also begins
considering psychic pleasures: he insists that friends should be valued not
only for their utility, but also for our feelings toward them. We should even
accept losing pleasure because of a friend, even though pleasure is the end. Theodorus
goes a step beyond Anniceris. He claims that the end of good actions is joy and
that of bad actions is grief. Surprisingly, he denies that friendship is
reasonable, since fools have friends only for utility and wise people need no
friends. He even regards pleasure as intermediate between practical wisdom and
its opposite. This seems to involve regarding happiness as the end, not
particular pleasures, and may involve losing particular pleasures for long-term
happiness.
D
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Experitum
-- Empiricism
– “with a capital E, of course.” – Grice. Czolbe, H., philosopher. He was born
in Danzig and trained in theology and medicine. His main works are Neue
Darstellung des Sensualismus “New Exposition of Sensualism,” 1855, Entstehung
des Selbstbewusstseins “Origin of Self-Consciousness,” 1856, Die Grenzen und
der Ursprung der menschlichen Erkenntnis “The Limits and Origin of Human
Knowledge,” 1865, and a posthumously published study, Grundzüge der
extensionalen Erkenntnistheorie 1875. Czolbe proposed a sensualistic theory of
knowledge: knowledge is a copy of the actual, and spatial extension is ascribed
even to ideas. Space is the support of all attributes. His later work defended
a non-reductive materialism. Czolbe made the rejection of the supersensuous a
central principle and defended a radical “senCzolbe, Heinrich Czolbe, Heinrich
201 201 sationalism.” Despite this, he
did not present a dogmatic materialism, but cast his philosophy in hypothetical
form. In his study of the origin of self-consciousness Czolbe held that
dissatisfaction with the actual world generates supersensuous ideas and branded
this attitude as “immoral.” He excluded supernatural phenomena on the basis not
of physiological or scientific studies but of a “moral feeling of duty towards
the natural world-order and contentment with it.” The same valuation led him to
postulate the eternality of terrestrial life. Nietzsche was familiar with
Czolbe’s works and incorporated some of his themes into his philosophy.
englishry: Grice was first
an Englishman, and then an Oxonian – and then a philosopher – and then a
genius! Englishness – Englishry, -- St. George for England. A critique of
racism, hostility, contempt, condescension, or prejudice, on the basis of
social practices of racial classification, and the wider phenomena of social,
economic, and political mistreatment that often accompany such classification.
The most salient instances of racism include the Nazi ideology of the “Aryan
master race,” chattel slavery, South African
apartheid in the late twentieth century, and the “Jim Crow” laws and traditions
of segregation that subjugated African descendants in the Southern United
States during the century after the
Civil War. Social theorists dispute whether, in its essence, racism is a
belief or an ideology of racial inferiority, a system of social oppression on
the basis of race, a form of discourse, discriminatory conduct, or an attitude
of contempt or heartlessness and its expression in individual or collective
behavior. The case for any of these as the essence of racism has its drawbacks,
and a proponent must show how the others can also come to be racist in virtue
of that essence. Some deny that racism has any nature or essence, insisting it
is nothing more than changing historical realities. However, these thinkers
must explain what makes each reality an instance of racism. Theorists differ
over who and what can be racist and under what circumstances, some restricting
racism to the powerful, others finding it also in some reactions by the
oppressed. Here, the former owe an explanation of why power is necessary for
racism, what sort economic or political? general or contextual?, and in whom or
what racist individuals? their racial groups?. Although virtually everyone thinks
racism objectionable, people disagree over whether its central defect is
cognitive irrationality, prejudice, economic/prudential inefficiency, or moral
unnecessary suffering, unequal treatment. Finally, racism’s connection with the
ambiguous and controversial concept of race itself is complex. Plainly, racism
presupposes the legitimacy of racial classifications, and perhaps the
metaphysical reality of races. Nevertheless, some hold that racism is also
prior to race, with racial classifications invented chiefly to explain and help
justify the oppression of some peoples by others. The term originated to
designate the pseudoscientific theories of racial essence and inferiority that
arose in Europe in the nineteenth century and were endorsed by G.y’s Third Reich.
Since the civil rights movement in the United States after World War II, the
term has come to cover a much broader range of beliefs, attitudes,
institutions, and practices. Today one hears charges of unconscious, covert,
institutional, paternalistic, benign, anti-racist, liberal, and even reverse
racism. Racism is widely regarded as involving ignorance, irrationality,
unreasonableness, injustice, and other intellectual and moral vices, to such an
extent that today virtually no one is willing to accept the classification of
oneself, one’s beliefs, and so on, as racist, except in contexts of
self-reproach. As a result, classifying anything as racist, beyond the most
egregious cases, is a serious charge and is often hotly disputed.
rational
Griceian deconstruction of communication -- a demonstration of the incompleteness
or incoherence of a philosophical position using concepts and principles of
argument whose meaning and use is legitimated only by that philosophical
position. A deconstruction is thus a kind of internal conceptual critique in
which the critic implicitly and provisionally adheres to the position
criticized. The early work of Derrida is the source of the term and provides
paradigm cases of its referent. That deconstruction remains within the position
being discussed follows from a fundamental deconstructive argument about the
nature of language and thought. Derrida’s earliest deconstructions argue
against the possibility of an interior “language” of thought and intention such
that the senses and referents of terms are determined by their very nature.
Such terms are “meanings” or logoi. Derrida calls accounts that presuppose such
magical thought-terms “logocentric.” He claims, following Heidegger, that the
conception of such logoi is basic to the concepts of Western metaphysics, and
that Western metaphysics is fundamental to our cultural practices and
languages. Thus there is no “ordinary language” uncontaminated by philosophy.
Logoi ground all our accounts of intention, meaning, truth, and logical
connection. Versions of logoi in the history of philosophy range from Plato’s
Forms through the self-interpreting ideas of the empiricists to Husserl’s
intentional entities. Thus Derrida’s fullest deconstructions are of texts that
give explicit accounts of logoi, especially his discussion of Husserl in Speech
and Phenomena. There, Derrida argues that meanings that are fully present to
consciousness are in decision tree deconstruction 209 209 principle impossible. The idea of a
meaning is the idea of a repeatable ideality. But “repeatability” is not a
feature that can be present. So meanings, as such, cannot be fully before the
mind. Selfinterpreting logoi are an incoherent supposition. Without logoi,
thought and intention are merely wordlike and have no intrinsic connection to a
sense or a referent. Thus “meaning” rests on connections of all kinds among
pieces of language and among our linguistic interactions with the world.
Without logoi, no special class of connections is specifically “logical.” Roughly
speaking, Derrida agrees with Quine both on the nature of meaning and on the
related view that “our theory” cannot be abandoned all at once. Thus a
philosopher must by and large think about a logocentric philosophical theory
that has shaped our language in the very logocentric terms that that theory has
shaped. Thus deconstruction is not an excision of criticized doctrines, but a
much more complicated, self-referential relationship. Deconstructive arguments
work out the consequences of there being nothing helpfully better than words,
i.e., of thoroughgoing nominalism. According to Derrida, without logoi
fundamental philosophical contrasts lose their principled foundations, since
such contrasts implicitly posit one term as a logos relative to which the other
side is defective. Without logos, many contrasts cannot be made to function as
principles of the sort of theory philosophy has sought. Thus the contrasts
between metaphorical and literal, rhetoric and logic, and other central notions
of philosophy are shown not to have the foundation that their use
presupposes.
deductum – also
demonstratum, argumentum -- deduction, a finite sequence of sentences whose
last sentence is a conclusion of the sequence the one said to be deduced and
which is such that each sentence in the sequence is an axiom or a premise or
follows from preceding sentences in the sequence by a rule of inference. A
synonym is ‘derivation’. Deduction is a system-relative concept. It makes sense
to say something is a deduction only relative to a particular system of axioms
and rules of inference. The very same sequence of sentences might be a
deduction relative to one such system but not relative to another. The concept
of deduction is a generalization of the concept of proof. A proof is a finite
sequence of sentences each of which is an axiom or follows from preceding
sentences in the sequence by a rule of inference. The last sentence in the
sequence is a theorem. Given that the system of axioms and rules of inference
are effectively specifiable, there is an effective procedure for determining,
whenever a finite sequence of sentences is given, whether it is a proof
relative to that system. The notion of theorem is not in general effective
decidable. For there may be no method by which we can always find a proof of a
given sentence or determine that none exists. The concepts of deduction and
consequence are distinct. The first is a syntactical; the second is semantical.
It was a discovery that, relative to the axioms and rules of inference of classical
logic, a sentence S is deducible from a set of sentences K provided that S is a
consequence of K. Compactness is an important consequence of this discovery. It
is trivial that sentence S is deducible from K just in case S is deducible from
Dedekind cut deductíon 211 211 some
finite subset of K. It is not trivial that S is a consequence of K just in case
S is a consequence of some finite subset of K. This compactness property had to
be shown. A system of natural deduction is axiomless. Proofs of theorems within
a system are generally easier with natural deduction. Proofs of theorems about
a system, such as the results mentioned in the previous paragraph, are
generally easier if the system has axioms. In a secondary sense, ‘deduction’
refers to an inference in which a speaker claims the conclusion follows
necessarily from the premises. -- deduction theorem, a result about certain
systems of formal logic relating derivability and the conditional. It states
that if a formula B is derivable from A and possibly other assumptions, then
the formula APB is derivable without the assumption of A: in symbols, if G 4
{A} Y B then GYAPB. The thought is that, for example, if Socrates is mortal is
derivable from the assumptions All men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then
If Socrates is a man he is mortal is derivable from All men are mortal.
Likewise, If all men are mortal then Socrates is mortal is derivable from
Socrates is a man. In general, the deduction theorem is a significant result
only for axiomatic or Hilbert-style formulations of logic. In most natural
deduction formulations a rule of conditional proof explicitly licenses
derivations of APB from G4{A}, and so there is nothing to prove.
DIC-TUM
-- IN-DEXICAL -- indexical: Grice: This is a
compound, from IN-, emphatic, and dex-, cognate with ‘dico,’ to say – cf.
deixis. -- Bradley’s thisness, and whatness – “Grice is improving on Scotus:
Aristotle’s tode ti is exactly Bradley’s thisness whatness – and more familiar
to the English ear than Scotus feminine ‘haecceitas.’” “Russell, being
pretentious, call Bradley’s “thisness” and “thatness,” but not “whatness” – as
a class of the ‘egocentric particular’ --
a type of expression whose semantic value is in part determined by
features of the context of utterance, and hence may vary with that context.
Among indexicals are the personal pronouns, such as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’,
and ‘it’; demonstratives, such as ‘this’ and ‘that’; temporal expressions, such
as ‘now’, ‘today’, ‘yesterday’; and locative expressions, such as ‘here’,
‘there’, etc. Although classical logic ignored indexicality, many recent
practitioners, following Richard Montague, have provided rigorous theories of
indexicals in the context of formal semantics. Perhaps the most plausible and
thorough treatment of indexicals is by David Kaplan, a prominent philosopher of
language and logic whose long-unpublished “Demonstratives” was especially
influential; it eventually appeared in J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein,
eds., Themes from Kaplan. Kaplan argues persuasively that indexical singular
terms are directly referential and a species of rigid designator. He also
forcefully brings out a crucial lesson to be learned from indexicals, namely,
that there are two types of meaning, which Kaplan calls “content” and
“character.” A sentence containing an indexical, such as ‘I am hungry’, can be
used to say different things in different contexts, in part because of the
different semantic contributions made by ‘I’ in these contexts. Kaplan calls a
term’s contribution to what is said in a context the term’s content. Though the
content of an indexical like ‘I’ varies with its context, it will nevertheless
have a single meaning in the language, which Kaplan calls the indexical’s
character. This character may be conceived as a rule of function that assigns
different contents to the indexical in different contexts.-- indicatum. “oριστική,”
“oristike,” – The Roman ‘indicatum’ is a composite of ‘in’ plus ‘dicatum.’ The
Romans were never sure about this. Literally for the Greeks it’s the
‘definitive’ – ‘horistike’ klesis, inclinatio or modus animae affectationem
demonstrans indefinitivus – While indefinitivus is the transliteration, the
Romans also used ‘finitivus’ ‘finitus,’ and ‘indicativus’ and ‘pronuntiativus’.
‘Grice distinguishes between the indicative mode and the informational mode.
One can hardly inform oneself. Yet one can utter an utterance in the indicative
mode without it being in what he calls the informational sub-mode. It’s
interesting that Grice thinks he has to distinguish between the ‘informational’
and the mere ‘indicative.’ Oddly when he sets the goal to which ‘co-operation’
leads, it’s the informing/being informed, influencing/being influenced. Surely
he could have simplified that by, as he later will, psi-transmission, whatever.
So the emissor INDICATES, even in an imperative utterance, what his will is.
All moves are primarily ‘exhibitive,’ (and the function of the mode is to
EXPRESS the corresponding attitude). Only some moves are ‘protreptic.’ Grice was
well aware, if perhaps not TOO aware, since Austin was so secretive, about
Austin on the ‘perlocution.’ Because Austin wanted to deprieve the act from the
cause of the act. Thus, Austin’s communicative act may have a causal intention,
leading to this or that effect – but that would NOT be part of the
philosopher’s interest. Suppose !p; whether the order is successful and Smith
does get a job he is promised, it hardly matters to Kant, Austin, or Grice.
Interestingly, ‘indicatum’ has the same root as ‘dic-‘, to say – but surely you
don’t need to say to indicate, as in Grice’s favourite indicative mood: a hand
wave signaling that the emissor knows the route or is about to leave the
emissee.
Dis-factum – dis-faccere -- defeasibility. Strawson Wiggins ‘somehwere in the kitchen,’ ‘in one of
the dining-room cupboards’ unless some feature of the context defeats the
implication, there is an implicaturum to the effect that the emissor cannot
make a ‘stronger’ move by Grice’s principle of conversational fortitude (“Be ‘a
fortiori’”). Cf. G. P. Baker on H. L. A.
Hart. All very Oxonian. Cf. R. Hall, Oxonian, on ‘Excluders.’ For Strawson and
Wiggins that a principle holds ‘generally, ceteris paribus, is a condition for
the existence of conversation, or of a good conversation. Defeasibility is a
sign of the freedom of the will. The communicators can always opt out. Not a
salivating dog. Note that defeasibility does not apply just to the implicaturum.
Since probabilistic demonstrate are uncertain, there is an element of
defeasibility in the EXplicatum of a probabilistic utterance. Levinson’s quote,
“Probability, Defeasibility, and Mode Operators.” Defeasibility
-- Grice: “So far as generalizations of these kinds are concerned, it seems to
me that one needs to be able to mark five features: (1) conditionality; (2)
generality; (3) type of generality (absolute, ceteris paribus, etc., thereby,
ipso facto, discriminating with respect to defeasibility or indefeasibility).” -- Baker, “Meaning
and defeasibility” – defeater – in Aspects of reason -- defeasibility, a
property that rules, principles, arguments, or bits of reasoning have when they
might be defeated by some competitor. For example, the epistemic principle
‘Objects normally have the properties they appear to have’ or the normative
principle ‘One should not lie’ are defeated, respectively, when perception
occurs under unusual circumstances e.g., under colored lights or when there is
some overriding moral consideration e.g., to prevent murder. Apparently
declarative sentences such as ‘Birds typically fly’ can be taken in part as
expressing defeasible rules: take something’s being a bird as evidence that it
flies. Defeasible arguments and reasoning inherit their defeasibility from the
use of defeasible rules or principles. Recent analyses of defeasibility include
circumscription and default logic, which belong to the broader category of
non-monotonic logic. The rules in several of these formal systems contain
special antecedent conditions and are not truly defeasible since they apply
whenever their conditions are satisfied. Rules and arguments in other
non-monotonic systems justify their conclusions only when they are not defeated
by some other fact, rule, or argument. John Pollock distinguishes between
rebutting and undercutting defeaters. ‘Snow is not normally red’ rebuts in
appropriate circumstances the principle ‘Things that look red normally are
red’, while ‘If the available light is red, do not use the principle that
things that look red normally are red’ only undercuts the embedded rule.
Pollock has influenced most other work on formal systems for defeasible
reasoning.
defensible – H. P. Grice, “Conceptual analysis and the defensible
province of philosophy.” Grice uses the ‘territorial’ province, and the further
implicaturum is that conceptual analysis as the province of philosophy is a
defensible one. Grice thinks it is.
definitum: Grice: There is the definitum and what Kant called the
infinitum --. Grice lists ‘the’ in his list of communicative devices. He was
interested in the iota operator. After Sluga, he knew there were problems here.
He proposed a quantificational approach alla Whitehead and Russell, indeed a
Whitehead and Russellian expansion in three clauses, with identity, involved.
Why wasn’t Russell not involved with the ‘indefinite’. One would think because
that’s rendered already by (Ex), ‘some (at least one)’. Russell’s interest in definitum is not
philosophical. His background was mathematics, rather --. Grice was obsessed
with ‘aspects’ in verbs. There’s the ‘imperfect’ and the ‘perfect.’ These
translate Aristotle’s ‘teleos’ and ‘ateleos.’ But why the change from “factum”
to “fectum”? So it’s better to turn to ‘definitum,’ and ‘indefinitum, as better
paraphrases of Aristotle’s jargon – keeping in mind we are talking of his
‘teleos’ and ‘ateleos. Aristotle
and telos. In the Met. Y.1048b1835, Aristotle discusses the definition of an
action πϱᾶξις. He distinguishes two kinds of activities: kinêseis ϰινήσεις and
energeiai ἐνέϱγειαι: Only that movement in which the end is present is an
action. E.g., at the same time we are v.ing and have v.n ὁϱᾷ ἅμα, are
understanding and have understood φϱονεῖ, are thinking and have thought noei
kai nenoêken νοεῖ ϰαὶ νενόηϰεν when it is not true that at the same time we are
learning and have learnt ou manthanei kai memathêken οὐ μανθάνει ϰαὶ μεμάθηϰεν,
or are being cured and have been cured oud’ hugiazetai kai hugiastai οὐδ᾿ ὑγιάζεται
ϰαὶ ὑγίασται. At the same time we are living well and have lived well εὖ ζῇ ϰαὶ
εὖ ἔζηϰεν ἅμα, and are happy and have been happy εὐδαιμονεῖ ϰαὶ εὐδαιμόνηϰεν.
Of these processes, then, we must call the one set movements ϰινήσεις, and the
other actualities energeiai ἐνέϱγειαι. We v. that the distinctive properties of
these two categories of verbs are provided by relations of inference and
semantic compatibility between the form of the present and the form of the
perfect. In the case of energeiai, there is a relation of inference between the
present and the perfect, in the sense that when someone says I v. we can infer
I have v.n. There is also a relation of semantic compatibility since one can
very well say I have v.n and continue to v.. Thus the two forms—the present and
the perfect— are verifiable at the same time ἅμα, simultaneously. On the other
hand, in the case of kinêseis, the present and the perfect are not verifiable
at the same time. In fact, when someone says I am building a house, we cannot
infer I have built a house, at least in the sense in which the house is
finished. In addition, once the house is finished, one is no longer
constructing it, which means that there is a semantic incompatibility between
the present and the perfect. τέλος, which means both complete action, that is,
end, and limit in competition with πέϱας, plays a crucial role in this
opposition. In the category of energeiai, we have actions proper, that is,
activities that are complete τέλεια because they have an immanent finality ἐνυπάϱχει
τὸ τέλος. In the category of kinêseis, we have imperfect activities ἀτελείς
that do not carry their own end within themselves but are transitive and aim at
realizing something. Thus activities having an external goal that is at the
same time a limit peras do not carry their own goal telos within themselves;
they are directed toward a goal but this goal is not attained during the
activity, but is realized at the end of the activity. And history repeated itself, in the same
terms, regarding Slavic languages, with on the one hand the words perfective
and imperfective, modeled on the Roman opposition and imported to describe an
opposition in which lexicon and grammar are truly interwoven since it is a
question of categories of verbs, which determine the whole organization of conjugation,
and on the other hand the Russian words that are used to characterize the same
categories of verbs, and that signify the accomplished and the unaccomplished.
In the terminological imbroglio, we can once again v. the effects of a
confusion connected with the inability to acknowledge the autonomy of lexical
aspect, or, in the particular case of Slavic languages, the difficulty of
isoRomang the aspectual dimension in the general system of the language.
Nevertheless, the same questions, that of the telos and that of accomplishment,
are at the foundation of the two aspectual dimensions. They are even so
prominent that, alongside the heterogeneous inventory from which we began, we
also find, and almost simultaneously in the aspectual tradition, a leveling of
all differences in favor of two categories that are supposed to be the
categories par excellence of grammatical aspect: the perfective on the one
hand, and the imperfective on the other. However, there is also the continuing
competition of the perfect, another tr. of the same word, perfectum,
designating a category that is not exactly the same as that of the perfective,
and which is, for its part, always a grammatical category, never a lexical
category: one speaks of perfect to designate compound tenses in G. ic
languages, e. g. , of the type I have received
as opposed to I received, which corresponds to the idea that the telos
is not only achieved, but transcended in the constitution of a fixed state,
given as the result of the completion of the process. Two, or three,
grammatical categories that are the same and not the same as the two, three, or
four lexical categories. It is in the name of these categories, and literally
behind their name, that the aspectual descriptions succeeded in being applicable
to all languages, confRomang all the imperfects of all languages and also the
Eng. progressive and the Russian imperfective, all the aorists in all
languages, and aligning perfects, perfectives, the Eng. perfect, the G. Perfekt, the Roman perfectum and the Grecian
perfect. The facts are different, but the words, and the recurrence of a
problematics that v.ms invariable, are too strong. Although it is a matter of
conjugations, the lexicon and the relation to ontological questions are too
influential. The word imperfectum was invented, we
v. a hesitation that is precisely the one that causes a problem here, between
imperfectum and infectum a nonachieved finality, an absence of finality. The
important point is that the whole history of aspectual terminology is
constituted by such exchanges. The invention of the words perfectum and
imperfectum itself proceeds from an enterprise of tr., in which it is a
question of taking as a model, or rephrasing, the Grecian grammarians’
opposition between suntelikos συντελιϰός and non-suntelikos. However, the
difference between the two terminologies is noticeable. A supine past
participle, -fectum, has replaced telikos, and hence telos, thereby
reintroducing, if not tense was tense really involved in that past participle?,
at least the achievement of an act, and consequently merges with the question
of the accomplished. In this operation, the Stoics’ opposition between
suntelikos which would thus designate the choice of perfects or imperfects and
παϱατατιϰός the extensive, in which the question of the telos is not involved
was made symmetrical, introducing into aspectual terminology a binariness from
which we have never recovered. And this symmetricalization, which sought to
describe the organization of a conjugation, was then modeled on the distinction
introduced by Aristotle between tτέλειος and aἀτελής, which was not grammatical
but lexical. This resulted in a new confusion that is not without foundation
because it was already implicit in the montage constructed by the Grecian
philosophers, with on the one hand the telos used by Aristotle to differentiate
types of process, and on the other the same telos used by the Stoics to
structure conjugation. exist in G. , is said to be primarily a matter of
discursive construction with the imparfait forming the background of a
narration, and the past tenses forming the foreground of what develops and
occurs. More recently, this area has been dominated by theories that situate
aspect in a theory of discursive representations cf. Kamp’s discourse
representation theory, and try to reduce it to a matter of discursive
organization: thus the models currently most discussed make the imparfait an
anaphoric mark that repeats an element of the context instead of constructing
an independent referent. Once again the relations are inextricably confused:
the types of discourse clearly have particular aspectual properties we have
already v.n this in connection with aoristic utterances that structure both
aspect and tense differently, and yet all or almost all aspectual forms can
appear anywhere, in all or almost all types of discursive contexts. Thus we
have foregrounded imparfaits, which have been recorded and are sometimes called
narrative imparfaits— e. g. , in an utterance like Trois jours après, il mourait
Three days later, he was dying, where it is a question of narrating a prominent
event, and where the distinction between imparfait and passé simple becomes
more difficult to evaluate. We also find passé composés in narratives, where
they compete with the passé simple: that is why many analysts of the language
consider the passé simple an archaic form that is being abandoned in favor of
the passé composé. The difficulty is clear: it is hard to attach a given formal
procedure to a given enunciative structuration, not only because enunciative
structures are supposed to be compatible with several aspectual values, but
first of all because the formal procedures themselves are all, more or less
broadly, polysemous, their value depending precisely on the context and thus on
the enunciative structure in which they are situated. Here again, this is
commonplace: polysemy is everywhere in languages. But in this case it affects
aspect: it consists precisely in running through aspectual oppositions, the
very ones that are also supposed to be associated with some aspectual marker.
The case of narrative uses of the imparfait v.ms to indicate that the imparfait
can have different aspectual values, of which some are more or less apparently
perfective. The narrative passé composés for instance, Il s’est levé et il est
sorti He got up and went out describe the process in its advent and thus do not
have the same aspectual properties as those that appear in utterances
describing the state resulting from the process e.g., Désolé, en ce moment il
est sorti Sorry, he left just now. Not to mention the presents, which are
highly polysemous in many languages and which, depending on the language,
therefore occupy a more or less extensive aspectual terrain. We are obliged to
note that aspect is at least partially independent of formal procedures, that
it also plays a role elsewhere, in particular, in the enunciative
configuration. teleology: the objectivum. Grice
speaks of the objective as a maxim. This is very Latinate. So if the maxim is
an objective, the goal is the objective, or objectivum. Meaning
"goal, aim" (1881) is from military term objective point (1852),
reflecting a sense evolution in French. This
is an expansion on the desideratum. Cf. ‘desirable,’ and ‘desirability,’ and
‘end.’ Grice feels like introducing goal-oriented conceptual machinery. In a
later stage of his career he ensured that this machinery be seen as NOT
mechanistically derivable. Which is odd seeing that in the ‘progression’ of the
‘soul,’ he allows for talk of adaptiveness and survival which suggest a
mechanist explanation. If an agent has a desideratum that means that, to echo
Bennett, A displays a goal-oriented behaviour, where the goal is the ‘telos.’
Smoke cannot ‘mean’ fire, because smoke doesn’t really behave in a
goal-oriented matter. Grice does play with the idea of finality in nature,
because that would allow him to justify the objectivity of his system. how does
soul originate from matter? Does the vegetal soul have a telos.
Purposive-behaviour is obvious in plants (phototropism). If it is present in
the vegetal soul, it is present in the animal soul. If it is present in the
animal soul, it is present in the rational soul. With each stage, alla
Hartmann, there are distinctions in the specification of the telos. Grice could
be more continental than Scheler! Grices métier. Unity of science was a very
New-World expression that Grice did not quite buy. Grice was brought up in a
world, the Old World, indeed, as he calls it in his Proem to the Locke lectures,
of Snows two cultures. At the time of Grices philosophising, philosophers such
as Winch (who indeed quotes fro Grice) were contesting the idea that science is
unitary, when it comes to the explanation of rational behaviour. Since a
philosophical approach to the explanation of rational behaviour, including
conversational behaviour (to account for the conversational implicatura) is his
priority, Grice needs to distinguish himself from those who propose a unified
science, which Grice regards as eliminationist and reductionist. Grice is
ambivalent about science and also playful (philosophia regina scientiarum).
Grice seems to presuppose, or implicate, that, since there is the devil of
scientism, science cannot get at teleology. The devil is in the physiological
details, which are irrelevant. The language Grice uses to describe his Ps as
goal-oriented, aimed at survival and reproduction, seems teleological and
somewhat scientific, though. But he means that ironically! As the scholastics
use it, teleology is a science, the science of telos, or finality (cf.
Aristotle on telos aitia, causa finalis. The unity of science is threatened by
teleology, and vice versa. Unified science seeks for a mechanistically
derivable teleology. But Grices sympathies lie for detached finality. Grice is
obsessed with the Greek idea of a telos, as slightly overused by Aristotle.
Grice thinks that some actions are for their own sake. What is the telos of
Oscar Wilde? Can we speak of Oscar Wilde’s métier? If a tiger is to tigerise, a
human is to humanise, and a person is to personise. Grice thought that
teleology is a key philosophical way to contest mechanism, so popular in The
New World. Strictly, and Grice knew this, teleology is constituted as a
discipline. One term that Cicero was unable to translate! For the philosopher,
teleology is that part of philosophy that studies the realm of the telos.
Informally, teleological is opposed to mechanistic. Grice is interested in the
mechanism/teleology debate, indeed jumps into it, with a goal in mind! Grice
finds some New-World philosophers too mechanistic-oriented, in contrast with
the more two-culture atmosphere he was familiar with at Oxford! Code is the
Aristotelian, and he and Grice are especially concerned in the idea of causa
finalis. For Grice only detached finality poses a threat to Mechanism, as it
should! Axiological objectivity is possible only given finality or purpose in
Nature, the admissibility of a final cause. Grice’s “Definition” of Meaning – and
Communicatum – Oddly, in “Utterer’s meaning and intentions,” Grice keeps
calling his analyses ‘definition,’ and ‘re-definition.’ He is well aware of the
trick introduced by Robinson on this. definiendum plural: definienda, the
expression that is defined in a definition. The expression that gives the
definition is the definiens plural: definientia. In the definition father, male
parent, ‘father’ is the definiendum and ‘male parent’ is the definiens. In the
definition ‘A human being is a rational animal’, ‘human being’ is the
definiendum and ‘rational animal’ is the definiens. Similar terms are used in
the case of conceptual analyses, whether they are meant to provide synonyms or
not; ‘definiendum’ for ‘analysandum’ and ‘definiens’ for ‘analysans’. In ‘x
knows that p if and only if it is true that p, x believes that p, and x’s
belief that p is properly justified’, ‘x knows that p’ is the analysandum and
‘it is true that p, x believes that p, and x’s belief that p is properly
justified’ is the analysans. definist,
someone who holds that moral terms, such as ‘right’, and evaluative terms, such
as ‘good’ in short, normative terms are definable in non-moral, non-evaluative
i.e., non-normative terms. William Frankena offers a broader account of a
definist as one who holds that ethical terms are definable in non-ethical
terms. This would allow that they are definable in nonethical but evaluative
terms say, ‘right’ in terms of what is
non-morally intrinsically good. Definists who are also naturalists hold that
moral terms can be defined by terms that denote natural properties, i.e.,
properties whose presence or absence can be determined by observational means.
They might define ‘good’ as ‘what conduces to pleasure’. Definists who are not
naturalists will hold that the terms that do the defining do not denote natural
properties, e.g., that ‘right’ means ‘what is commanded by God’. definition, specification of the meaning or,
alternatively, conceptual content, of an expression. For example, ‘period of
fourteen days’ is a definition of ‘fortnight’. Definitions have traditionally
been judged by rules like the following: 1 A definition should not be too
narrow. ‘Unmarried adult male psychiatrist’ is too narrow a definition for
‘bachelor’, for some bachelors are not psychiatrists. ‘Having vertebrae and a
liver’ is too narrow for ‘vertebrate’, for, even though all actual vertebrate
things have vertebrae and a liver, it is possible for a vertebrate thing to
lack a liver. 2 A definition should not be too broad. ‘Unmarried adult’ is too
broad a definition for ‘bachelor’, for not all unmarried adults are bachelors.
‘Featherless biped’ is too broad for ‘human being’, for even though all actual
featherless bipeds are human beings, it is possible for a featherless biped to
be non-human. 3 The defining expression in a definition should ideally exactly
match the degree of vagueness of the expression being defined except in a
precising definition. ‘Adult female’ for ‘woman’ does not violate this rule,
but ‘female at least eighteen years old’ for ‘woman’ does. 4 A definition
should not be circular. If ‘desirable’ defines ‘good’ and ‘good’ defines
‘desirable’, these definitions are circular. Definitions fall into at least the
following kinds: analytical definition: definition whose corresponding
biconditional is analytic or gives an analysis of the definiendum: e.g.,
‘female fox’ for ‘vixen’, where the corresponding biconditional ‘For any x, x is
a vixen if and only if x is a female fox’ is analytic; ‘true in all possible
worlds’ for ‘necessarily true’, where the corresponding biconditional ‘For any
P, P is necessarily true if and only if P is true in all possible worlds’ gives
an analysis of the definiendum. contextual definition: definition of an
expression as it occurs in a larger expression: e.g., ‘If it is not the case
that Q, then P’ contextually defines ‘unless’ as it occurs in ‘P unless Q’;
‘There is at least one entity that is F and is identical with any entity that
is F’ contextually defines ‘exactly one’ as it occurs in ‘There is exactly one
F’. Recursive definitions see below are an important variety of contextual
definition. Another important application of contextual definition is Russell’s
theory of descriptions, which defines ‘the’ as it occurs in contexts of the
form ‘The so-and-so is such-and-such’. coordinative definition: definition of a
theoretical term by non-theoretical terms: e.g., ‘the forty-millionth part of
the circumference of the earth’ for ‘meter’. definition by genus and species:
When an expression is said to be applicable to some but not all entities of a
certain type and inapplicable to all entities not of that type, the type in
question is the genus, and the subtype of all and only those entities to which
the expression is applicable is the species: e.g., in the definition ‘rational
animal’ for ‘human’, the type animal is the genus and the subtype human is the
species. Each species is distinguished from any other of the same genus by a
property called the differentia. definition in use: specification of how an
expression is used or what it is used to express: e.g., ‘uttered to express
astonishment’ for ‘my goodness’. Vitters emphasized the importance of
definition in use in his use theory of meaning. definition per genus et
differentiam: definition by genus and difference; same as definition by genus
and species. explicit definition: definition that makes it clear that it is a
definition and identifies the expression being defined as such: e.g., ‘Father’
means ‘male parent’; ‘For any x, x is a father by definition if and only if x
is a male parent’. implicit definition: definition that is not an explicit
definition. lexical definition: definition of the kind commonly thought
appropriate for dictionary definitions of natural language terms, namely, a
specification of their conventional meaning. nominal definition: definition of
a noun usually a common noun, giving its linguistic meaning. Typically it is in
terms of macrosensible characteristics: e.g., ‘yellow malleable metal’ for
‘gold’. Locke spoke of nominal essence and contrasted it with real essence.
ostensive definition: definition by an example in which the referent is
specified by pointing or showing in some way: e.g., “ ‘Red’ is that color,”
where the word ‘that’ is accompanied with a gesture pointing to a patch of
colored cloth; “ ‘Pain’ means this,” where ‘this’ is accompanied with an
insertion of a pin through the hearer’s skin; “ ‘Kangaroo’ applies to all and only
animals like that,” where ‘that’ is accompanied by pointing to a particular
kangaroo. persuasive definition: definition designed to affect or appeal to the
psychological states of the party to whom the definition is given, so that a
claim will appear more plausible to the party than it is: e.g., ‘self-serving
manipulator’ for ‘politician’, where the claim in question is that all
politicians are immoral. precising definition: definition of a vague expression
intended to reduce its vagueness: e.g., ‘snake longer than half a meter and
shorter than two meters’ for ‘snake of average length’; ‘having assets ten
thousand times the median figure’ for ‘wealthy’. prescriptive definition:
stipulative definition that, in a recommendatory way, gives a new meaning to an
expression with a previously established meaning: e.g., ‘male whose primary
sexual preference is for other males’ for ‘gay’. real definition: specification
of the metaphysically necessary and sufficient condition for being the kind of
thing a noun usually a common noun designates: e.g., ‘element with atomic
number 79’ for ‘gold’. Locke spoke of real essence and contrasted it with
nominal essence. recursive definition also called inductive definition and
definition by recursion: definition in three clauses in which 1 the expression
defined is applied to certain particular items the base clause; 2 a rule is
given for reaching further items to which the expression applies the recursive,
or inductive, clause; and 3 it is stated that the expression applies to nothing
else the closure clause. E.g., ‘John’s parents are John’s ancestors; any parent
of John’s ancestor is John’s ancestor; nothing else is John’s ancestor’. By the
base clause, John’s mother and father are John’s ancestors. Then by the
recursive clause, John’s mother’s parents and John’s father’s parents are
John’s ancestors; so are their parents, and so on. Finally, by the last closure
clause, these people exhaust John’s ancestors. The following defines
multiplication in terms of definition definition 214 214 addition: ‘0 $ n % 0. m ! 1 $ n % m $ n
! n. Nothing else is the result of multiplying integers’. The base clause tells
us, e.g., that 0 $ 4 % 0. The recursive clause tells us, e.g., that 0 ! 1 $ 4 %
0 $ 4 ! 4. We then know that 1 $ 4 % 0 ! 4 % 4. Likewise, e.g., 2 $ 4 % 1 ! 1 $
4 % 1 $ 4 ! 4 % 4 ! 4 % 8. stipulative definition: definition regardless of the
ordinary or usual conceptual content of the expression defined. It postulates a
content, rather than aiming to capture the content already associated with the
expression. Any explicit definition that introduces a new expression into the
language is a stipulative definition: e.g., “For the purpose of our discussion
‘existent’ means ‘perceivable’ “; “By ‘zoobeedoobah’ we shall mean ‘vain
millionaire who is addicted to alcohol’.” synonymous definition: definition of
a word or other linguistic expression by another word synonymous with it: e.g.,
‘buy’ for ‘purchase’; ‘madness’ for ‘insanity’.
Refs.: There are specific essays on
‘teleology,’ ‘final cause,’ and ‘finality,’ the The Grice Papers. Some of the
material published in “Reply to Richards” (repr. in “Conception”) and “Actions
and events,” The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
datum: in epistemology,
the “brute fact” element to be found or postulated as a component of perceptual
experience. Some theorists who endorse the existence of a given element in
experience think that we can find this element by careful introspection of what
we experience Moore, H. H. Price. Such theorists generally distinguish between
those components of ordinary perceptual awareness that constitute what we
believe or know about the objects we perceive and those components that we
strictly perceive. For example, if we analyze introspectively what we are aware
of when we see an apple we find that what we believe of the apple is that it is
a three-dimensional object with a soft, white interior; what we see of it,
strictly speaking, is just a red-shaped expanse of one of its facing sides.
This latter is what is “given” in the intended sense. Other theorists treat the
given as postulated rather than introspectively found. For example, some
theorists treat cognition as an activity imposing form on some material given
in conscious experience. On this view, often attributed to Kant, the given and
the conceptual are interdefined and logically inseparable. Sometimes this
interdependence is seen as rendering a description of the given as impossible;
in this case the given is said to be ineffable C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World
Order. On some theories of knowledge foundationalism the first variant of the
given that which is “found” rather than
“postulated” provides the empirical
foundations of what we might know or justifiably believe. Thus, if I believe on
good evidence that there is a red apple in front of me, the evidence is the
non-cognitive part of my perceptual awareness of the red appleshaped expanse.
Epistemologies postulating the first kind of givenness thus require a single
entity-type to explain the sensorial nature of perception and to provide
immediate epistemic foundations for empirical knowledge. This requirement is
now widely regarded as impossible to satisfy; hence Wilfred Sellars describes
the discredited view as the myth of the given.
Degradatum
-- degree:
Grice on the flat/variable distinction – Grice considers that ‘ought’ is weaker
than ‘must’ – ‘ought’ displays ‘degree-acceptability.’ Grice loved a degree –
he uses “d” in aspects of reason -- degree, also called arity, adicity, in
formal languages, a property of predicate and function expressions that
determines the number of terms with which the expression is correctly combined
to yield a well-formed expression. If an expression combines with a single term
to form a wellformed expression, it is of degree one monadic, singulary.
Expressions that combine with two terms are of degree two dyadic, binary, and
so on. Expressions of degree greater than or equal to two are polyadic. The
formation rules of a formalized language must effectively specify the degrees
of its primitive expressions as part of the effective determination of the
class of wellformed formulas. Degree is commonly indicated by an attached
superscript consisting of an Arabic numeral. Formalized languages have been
studied that contain expressions having variable degree or variable adicity and
that can thus combine with any finite number of terms. An abstract relation
that would be appropriate as extension of a predicate expression is subject to
the same terminology, and likewise for function expressions and their
associated functions. -- degree of
unsolvability, a maximal set of equally complex sets of natural numbers, with
comparative complexity of sets of natural numbers construed as
recursion-theoretic reducibility ordering. Recursion theorists investigate
various notions of reducibility between sets of natural numbers, i.e., various
ways of filling in the following schematic definition. For sets A and B of
natural numbers: A is reducible to B iff if and only if there is an algorithm
whereby each membership question about A e.g., ‘17 1 A?’ could be answered
allowing consultation of an definition, contextual degree of unsolvability
215 215 “oracle” that would correctly
answer each membership question about B. This does not presuppose that there is
a “real” oracle for B; the motivating idea is counterfactual: A is reducible to
B iff: if membership questions about B were decidable then membership questions
about A would also be decidable. On the other hand, the mathematical
definitions of notions of reducibility involve no subjunctive conditionals or
other intensional constructions. The notion of reducibility is determined by
constraints on how the algorithm could use the oracle. Imposing no constraints
yields T-reducibility ‘T’ for Turing, the most important and most studied
notion of reducibility. Fixing a notion r of reducibility: A is r-equivalent to
B iff A is r-reducible to B and B is rreducible to A. If r-reducibility is
transitive, r-equivalence is an equivalence relation on the class of sets of
natural numbers, one reflecting a notion of equal complexity for sets of
natural numbers. A degree of unsolvability relative to r an r-degree is an
equivalence class under that equivalence relation, i.e., a maximal class of
sets of natural numbers any two members of which are r-equivalent, i.e., a
maximal class of equally complex in the sense of r-reducibility sets of natural
numbers. The r-reducibility-ordering of sets of natural numbers transfers to
the rdegrees: for d and dH r-degrees, let d m, dH iff for some A 1 d and B 1 dH
A is r-reducible to B. The study of r-degrees is the study of them under this
ordering. The degrees generated by T-reducibility are the Turing degrees.
Without qualification, ‘degree of unsolvability’ means ‘Turing degree’. The
least Tdegree is the set of all recursive i.e., using Church’s thesis, solvable
sets of natural numbers. So the phrase ‘degree of unsolvability’ is slightly
misleading: the least such degree is “solvability.” By effectively coding
functions from natural numbers to natural numbers as sets of natural numbers,
we may think of such a function as belonging to a degree: that of its coding
set. Recursion theorists have extended the notions of reducibility and degree
of unsolvability to other domains, e.g. transfinite ordinals and higher types
taken over the natural numbers.
demonstratum: Cf. illatum – In act of communication, Grice’s focus is on
the reasoning on the emissor’s part. This is end-means. The conversational
moves is the most effectively designed move. The potential uptake by the
emissee is also taken into the consideration by the emissor. And actual uptake
is not of philosophical importance. hen Grice tried to conceptualise what
‘communicating’ and ‘smoke means fire’ have in common he came with the idea of
‘consequentia,’ as a dyadic relation that, eventually, will become triadic,
with the missor and the missee brought into the bargain. “Look that smoke,
there must be fire somewhere’ – “By that handwave, he meant that he was about
to leave me.” In any case, Grice’s arriving at ‘consequentia’ is exactly
Hobbes’s idea in “Computatio.’ And ‘con-sequentia’ involves a bit of
‘demonstratio.’ One thing follows the other. One thing YIELDS the other. The
link may be causal (smoke means fire) or ‘communicative’). ‘Rationality’ is one
of those words Austin forbids to use. Grice would venture with ‘reason,’ and
better, ‘reasons’ to make it countable, and good for botanising. Only in the
New World, and when he started to get input from non-philosophers, did Grice
explore ‘rationality’ itself. Oxonians philosophers take it for granted, and do
not have to philosophise about it. Especially those who belong to Grice’s play
group of ‘ordinary-language’ philosophers! Oxonian philosophers will quote from
the Locke version! Obviously, while each of the four lectures credits their own
entry below, it may do to reflect on Grices overall aim. Grice structures the
lectures in the form of a philosophical dialogue with his audience. The
first lecture is intended to provide a bit of linguistic botanising for
reasonable, and rational. In later lectures, Grice tackles reason qua
noun. The remaining lectures are meant to explore what he calls the
Aequi-vocality thesis: must has only one Fregeian that crosses what he calls
the buletic-doxastic divide. He is especially concerned ‒ this being
the Kant lectures ‒ with Kants attempt to reduce the
categorical imperative to a counsel of prudence (Ratschlag der Klugheit), where
Kants prudence is Klugheit, versus skill, as in rule of skill, and even if Kant
defines Klugheit as a skill to attain what is good for oneself ‒
itself divided into privatKlugheit and Weltklugheit. Kant re-introduces the
Aristotelian idea of eudaimonia. While a further lecture on happiness as
the pursuit of a system of ends is NOT strictly part of the either the
Kant or the Locke lectures, it relates, since eudaemonia may be
regarded as the goal involved in the relevant
imperative. “Aspects”, Clarendon, Stanford, The Kant memorial
Lectures, “Aspects,” Clarendon, Some aspects of reason, Stanford; reason,
reasoning, reasons. The lectures were also delivered as the Locke
lectures. Grice is concerned with the reduction of the categorical
imperative to the hypothetical or suppositional imperative. His main
thesis he calls the æqui-vocality thesis: must has one unique or singular
sense, that crosses the buletic-boulomaic/doxastic divide. “Aspects,”
Clarendon, Grice, “Aspects, Clarendon, Locke lecture notes: reason. On
“Aspects”. Including extensive language botany on rational, reasonable, and
indeed reason (justificatory, explanatory, and mixed). At this point,
Grice notes that linguistic botany is indispensable towards the construction of
a more systematic explanatory theory. It is an exploration of a range of
uses of reason that leads him to his Aequi-vocality thesis that must has only
one sense; also ‘Aspects of reason and reasoning,’ in Grice, “Aspects,”
Clarendon, the Locke lectures, the Kant lectures, Stanford, reason,
happiness. While Locke hardly mentions reason, his friend Burthogge does,
and profusely! It was slightly ironic that Grice had delivered these
lectures as the Rationalist Kant lectures at Stanford. He was honoured to
be invited to Oxford. Officially, to be a Locke lecture you have to be *visiting*
Oxford. While Grice was a fellow of St. Johns, he was still most welcome
to give his set of lectures on reasoning at the Sub-Faculty of
Philosophy. He quotes very many authors, including Locke! In his proemium,
Grice notes that while he was rejected the Locke scholarship back in the day,
he was extremely happy to be under Lockes ægis now! When preparing for his
second lecture, he had occasion to revise some earlier drafts dated pretty
early, on reasons, Grice, “Aspects,” Clarendon, reason,
reasons. Linguistic analysis on justificatory, explanatory and mixed uses
of reason. While Grice knows that the basic use of reason is qua verb
(reasoner reasons from premise p to conclusion c), he spends some time in
exploring reason as noun. Grice found it a bit of a roundabout way to
approach rationality. However, his distinction between justificatory and
explanatory reason is built upon his linguistic botany on the use of reason qua
noun. Explanatory reason seems more basic for Grice than justificatory
reason. Explanatory reason explains the behaviour of a rational
agent. Grice is aware of Freud and his rationalizations. An agent may
invoke some reason for his acting which is not legitimate. An agent may
convince himself that he wants to move to Bournemouth because of the weather;
when in fact, his reason to move to Bournemouth is to be closer to Cowes and
join the yacht club there. Grice loved an enthymeme. Grices enthymeme. Grice,
the implicit reasoner! As the title of the lecture implies, Grice takes the
verb, to reason, as conceptually prior. A reasoner reasons, briefly, from a
premise to a conclusion. There are types of reason: flat reason and gradual
reason. He famously reports Shropshire, another tutee with Hardie, and his
proof on the immortality of the human soul. Grice makes some remarks on akrasia
as key, too. The first lecture is then dedicated to an elucidation, and indeed
attempt at a conceptual analysis in terms of intentions and doxastic conditions
reasoner R intends that premise P yields conclusion C and believes his
intention will cause his entertaining of the conclusion from his entertaining
the premise. One example of particular interest for a study of the use of
conversational reason in Grice is that of the connection between implicaturum
and reasoning. Grice entitles the sub-section of the lecture as Too good to be
reasoning, which is of course a joke. Cf. too much love will kill you, and
Theres no such thing as too much of a good thing (Shakespeare, As you like it).
Grice notes: I have so far been considering difficulties which may arise from
the attempt to find, for all cases of actual reasoning, reconstructions of
sequences of utterances or explicit thoughts which the reasoner might plausibly
be supposed to think of as conforming to some set of canonical patterns of
inference. Grice then turns to a different class of examples, with regard to
which the problem is not that it is difficult to know how to connect them with
canonical patterns, but rather that it is only too easy (or shall I say
trivial) to make the connection. Like some children (not many), some cases of
reasoning are too well behaved for their own good. Suppose someone says to
Grice, and It is very interesting that Grice gives conversational examples.
Jack has arrived, Grice replies, I conclude from that that Jack has arrived. Or
he says Jack has arrived AND Jill has *also* arrived, And Grice replies, I
conclude that Jill has arrived.(via Gentzens conjunction-elimination). Or he
says, My wife is at home. And Grice replies, I reason from that that someone
(viz. your wife) is at home. Is there not something very strange about the
presence in my three replies of the verb conclude (in example I and II) and the
verb reason (in the third example)? misleading, but doxastically fine,
professor! It is true, of course, that if instead of my first reply I had said
(vii) vii. So Jack has arrived, has he? the strangeness would have been
removed. But here so serves not to indicate that an inference is being made,
but rather as part of a not that otiose way of expressing surprise. One might
just as well have said (viii). viii. Well, fancy that! Now, having spent a
sizeable part of his life exploiting it, Grice is not unaware of the truly fine
distinction between a statements being false (or axiologically satisfactory),
and its being true (or axiologically satisfactory) but otherwise
conversationally or pragmatically misleading or inappropriate or pointless,
and, on that account and by such a fine distinction, a statement, or an
utterance, or conversational move which it would be improper (in terms of the
reasonable/rational principle of conversational helfpulness) in one way or
another, to make. It is worth considering Grices reaction to his own
distinction. Entailment is in sight! But Grice does not find himself lured by
the idea of using that distinction here! Because Moores entailment, rather than
Grices implicaturum is entailed. Or because explicatu, rather than implicaturum
is involved. Suppose, again, that I were to break off the chapter at this
point, and switch suddenly to this argument. ix. I have two hands (here is one
hand and here is another). If had three more hands, I would have five. If I
were to have double that number I would have ten, and if four of them were
removed six would remain. So I would have four more hands than I have now. Is
one happy to describe this performance as reasoning? Depends whos one and whats
happy!? There is, however, little doubt that I have produced a canonically
acceptable chain of statements. So surely that is reasoning, if only conversationally
misleadingly called so. Or suppose that, instead of writing in my customary
free and easy style, I had framed my remarks (or at least the argumentative
portions of my remarks) as a verbal realization, so to speak, of sequences of
steps in strict conformity with the rules of a natural-deduction system of
first-order predicate logic. I give, that is to say, an updated analogue of a
medieval disputation. Implicaturum. Gentzen is Ockham. Would those brave souls
who continued to read be likely to think of my performance as the production of
reasoning, or would they rather think of it as a crazy formalisation of
reasoning conducted at some previous time? Depends on crazy or formalisation.
One is reminded of Grice telling Strawson, If you cannot formalise, dont say
it; Strawson: Oh, no! If I can formalise it, I shant say it! The points
suggested by this stream of rhetorical questions may be summarized as follows.
Whether the samples presented FAIL to achieve the title of reasoning, and thus
be deemed reasoning, or whether the samples achieve the title, as we may
figuratively put it, by the skin of their teeth, perhaps does not very greatly
matter. For whichever way it is, the samples seem to offend against something
(different things in different cases, Im sure) very central to our conception
of reasoning. So central that Moore would call it entailment! A mechanical
application of a ground rule of inference, or a concatenation thereof, is
reluctantly (if at all) called reasoning. Such a mechanical application may
perhaps legitimately enter into (i.e. form individual steps in) authentic
reasonings, but they are not themselves reasonings, nor is a string of them.
There is a demand that a reasoner should be, to a greater or lesser degree, the
author of his reasonings. Parroted sequences are not reasonings when parroted,
though the very same sequences might be reasoning if not parroted. Ped
sequences are another matter. Some of the examples Grice gives are deficient
because they are aimless or pointless. Reasoning is characteristically
addressed to this or that problem: a small problem, a large problem, a problem
within a problem, a clear problem, a hazy problem, a practical problem, an
intellectual problem; but a problem! A mere flow of ideas minimally qualifies
(or can be deemed) as reasoning, even if it happens to be logically
respectable. But if it is directed, or even monitored (with intervention should
it go astray, not only into fallacy or mistake, but also into such things as
conversational irrelevance or otiosity!), that is another matter! Finicky
over-elaboration of intervening steps is frowned upon, and in extreme cases
runs the risk of forfeiting the title of reasoning. In conversation, such
over-elaboration will offend against this or that conversational maxim, against
(presumably) some suitably formulated maxim conjoining informativeness. As
Grice noted with regard to ‘That pillar box seems red to me.’ That would be
baffling if the addressee fails to detect the communication-point. An utterance
is supposed to inform, and what is the above meant to inform its addressee? In
thought, it will be branded as pedantry or neurotic caution. If a distinction
between brooding and conversing is to be made! At first sight, perhaps, one
would have been inclined to say that greater rather than lesser
explicitnessness is a merit. Not that inexplicitness, or implicaturum-status,
as it were ‒ is bad, but that, other things being equal, the more explicitness
the better. But now it looks as if proper explicitness (or explicatum-status)
is an Aristotelian mean, or mesotes, and it would be good some time to enquire
what determines where that mean lies. The burden of the foregoing observations
seems to me to be that the provisional account of reasoning, which has been before
us, leaves out something which is crucially important. What it leaves out is
the conception of reasoning, as I like to see conversation, as a purposive
activity, as something with goals and purposes. The account or picture leaves
out, in short, the connection of reasoning with the will! Moreover, once we
avail ourselves of the great family of additional ideas which the importation
of this conception would give us, we shall be able to deal with the quandary
which I laid before you a few minutes ago. For we could say e.g. that R reasons
(informally) from p to c just in case R thinks that p and intends that, in
thinking c, he should be thinking something which would be the conclusion of a
formally valid argument the premisses of which are a supplementation of p. This
will differ from merely thinking that there exists some formally valid
supplementation of a transition from p to c, which I felt inclined NOT to count
as (or deem) reasoning. I have some hopes that this appeal to the purposiveness
or goal-oriented character of authentic reasoning or good reasoning might be
sufficient to dispose of the quandary on which I have directed it. But I am by
no means entirely confident that this is the case, and so I offer a second
possible method of handling the quandary, one to which I shall return later
when I shall attempt to place it in a larger context. We have available to us
(let us suppose) what I might call a hard way of making inferential moves. We
in fact employ this laborious, step-by-step procedure at least when we are in
difficulties, when the course is not clear, when we have an awkward (or
philosophical) audience, and so forth. An inferential judgement, however, is a
normally desirable undertaking for us only because of its actual or hoped for
destinations, and is therefore not desirable for its own sake (a respect in
which, possibly, it may differ from an inferential capacity). Following the
hard way consumes time and energy. These are in limited supply and it would,
therefore, be desirable if occasions for employing the hard way were minimized.
A substitute for the hard way, the quick way, which is made possible by
habituation and intention, is available to us, and the capacity for it (which
is sometimes called intelligence, and is known to be variable in degree) is a
desirable quality. The possibility of making a good inferential step (there
being one to be made), together with such items as a particular inferers
reputation for inferential ability, may determine whether on a particular
occasion we suppose a particular transition to be inferential (and so to be a
case of reasoning) or not. On this account, it is not essential that there
should be a single supplementation of an informal reasoning which is supposed
to be what is overtly in the inferers mind, though quite often there may be
special reasons for supposing this to be the case. So Botvinnik is properly
credited with a case of reasoning, while Shropshire is not. Drawing from his
recollections of an earlier linguistic botany on reason. Grice distinguishes
between justificatory reason and explanatory reason. There is a special case of
mixed reason, explanatory-cum-justificatory. The lecture can be seen as the way
an exercise that Austin took as taxonomic can lead to explanatory adequacy,
too! Bennett is an excellent correspondent. He holds a very interesting
philosophical correspondence with Hare. This is just one f. with Grices
correspondence with Bennett. Oxford don, Christchurh, NZ-born Bennett, of
Magdalen, B. Phil. Oxon. Bennett has an essay on the interpretation of a formal
system under Austin. It is interesting that Bennett was led to consider the
interpretation of a formal system under Austins Play Group. Bennett attends
Grices seminars. He is my favourite philosopher. Bennett quotes Grice in his Linguistic
behaviour. In return, Grice quotes Bennett in the Preface
toWOW. Bennett has an earlier essay on rationality, which evidences that
the topic is key at Grices Oxford. Bennett has studied better than anyone the
way Locke is Griceian. A word or expression does not just stand for idea, but
for the intention of the utterer to stand for it! Grice also enjoyed construal
by Bennett of Grice as a nominalist. Bennett makes a narrow use of the epithet.
Since Grice does distinguish between an utterance-token (x) and an
utterance-type, and considers that the attribution of meaning from token to
type is metabolic, this makes Grice a nominalist. Bennett is one of the few to
follow Kantotle and make him popular on the pages of the Times Literary
Supplement, of all places. Refs.: The locus classicus is “Aspects,” Clarendon.
But there are allusions on ‘reason’ and ‘rationality, in The H. P. Grice
Papers, BANC.
denotatum -- denotation, the
thing or things that an expression applies to; extension. The term is used in contrast
with ‘meaning’ and ‘connotation’. A pair of expressions may apply to the same
things, i.e., have the same denotation, yet differ in meaning: ‘triangle’,
‘trilateral’; ‘creature with a heart’, ‘creature with a kidney’; ‘bird’,
‘feathered earthling’; ‘present capital of France’, ‘City of Light’. If a term
does not apply to anything, some will call it denotationless, while others
would say that it denotes the empty set. Such terms may differ in meaning:
‘unicorn’, ‘centaur’, ‘square root of pi’. Expressions may apply to the same
things, yet bring to mind different associations, i.e., have different
connotations: ‘persistent’, ‘stubborn’, ‘pigheaded’; ‘white-collar employee’,
‘office worker’, ‘professional paper-pusher’; ‘Lewis Carroll’, ‘Reverend Dodgson’.
There can be confusion about the denotation-connotation terminology, because
this pair is used to make other contrasts. Sometimes the term ‘connotation’ is
used more broadly, so that any difference of either meaning or association is
considered a difference of connotation. Then ‘creature with a heart’ and
‘creature with a liver’ might be said to denote the same individuals or sets
but to connote different properties. In a second use, denotation is the
semantic value of an expression. Sometimes the denotation of a general term is
said to be a property, rather than the things having the property. This occurs
when the denotation-connotation terminology is used to contrast the property
expressed with the connotation. Thus ‘persistent’ and ‘pig-headed’ might be
said to denote the same property but differ in connotation.
Grice’s
deontic operator
– “The deon is like the Roman ‘necesse,’ Grice was aware of Bentham’s play on
words with deontology -- as a Kantian, Griceian is a deontologist. However, he
refers to the ‘sorry story of deontic logic,’ because of von Wright (from whom
he borrowed but to whom he never returned ‘alethic’) deontic logic, the logic
of obligation and permission. There are three principal types of formal deontic
systems. 1 Standard deontic logic, or SDL, results from adding a pair of
monadic deontic operators O and P, read as “it ought to be that” and “it is
permissible that,” respectively, to the classical propositional calculus. SDL
contains the following axioms: tautologies of propositional logic, OA S - P -
A, OA / - O - A, OA / B / OA / OB, and OT, where T stands for any tautology.
Rules of inference are modus ponens and substitution. See the survey of SDL by
Dagfinn Follesdal and Risto Hilpinin in R. Hilpinin, ed., Deontic Logic, 1. 2
Dyadic deontic logic is obtained by adding a pair of dyadic deontic operators O
/ and P / , to be read as “it ought to
be that . . . , given that . . .” and “it is permissible that . . . , given
that . . . ,” respectively. The SDL monadic operator O is defined as OA S OA/T;
i.e., a statement of absolute obligation OA becomes an obligation conditional
on tautologous conditions. A statement of conditional obligation OA/B is true
provided that some value realized at some B-world where A holds is better than
any value realized at any B-world where A does not hold. This axiological
construal of obligation is typically accompanied by these axioms and rules of
inference: tautologies of propositional logic, modus ponens, and substitution,
PA/C S - O-A/C, OA & B/C S [OA/C & OB/C], OA/C / PA/C, OT/C / OC/C,
OT/C / OT/B 7 C, [OA/B & OA/C] / OA/B 7 C, [PB/B 7 C & OA/B 7 C] /
OA/B, and [P< is the negation of any tautology. See the comparison of
alternative dyadic systems in Lennart Aqvist, Introduction to Deontic Logic and
the Theory of Normative Systems, 7. 3 Two-sorted deontic logic, due to
Castañeda Thinking and Doing, 5, pivotally distinguishes between propositions,
the bearers of truth-values, and practitions, the contents of commands,
imperatives, requests, and such. Deontic operators apply to practitions,
yielding propositions. The deontic operators Oi, Pi, Wi, and li are read as “it
is obligatory i that,” “it is permissible i that,” “it is wrong i that,” and
“it is optional i denotation deontic logic 219
219 that,” respectively, where i stands for any of the various types of
obligation, permission, and so on. Let p stand for indicatives, where these
express propositions; let A and B stand for practitives, understood to express
practitions; and allow p* to stand for both indicatives and practitives. For
deontic definition there are PiA S - Oi - A, WiA S Oi - A, and LiA S - OiA
& - Oi - A. Axioms and rules of inference include p*, if p* has the form of
a truth-table tautology, OiA / - Oi - A, O1A / A, where O1 represents
overriding obligation, modus ponens for both indicatives and practitives, and
the rule that if p & A1 & . . . & An / B is a theorem, so too is p
& OiA1 & . . . & OiAn / OiB.
-- deontic paradoxes, the paradoxes of deontic logic, which typically
arise as follows: a certain set of English sentences about obligation or
permission appears logically consistent, but when these same sentences are
represented in a proposed system of deontic logic the result is a formally
inconsistent set. To illustrate, a formulation is provided below of how two of
these paradoxes beset standard deontic logic. The contrary-to-duty imperative
paradox, made famous by Chisholm Analysis, 3, arises from juxtaposing two apparent
truths: first, some of us sometimes do what we should not do; and second, when
such wrongful doings occur it is obligatory that the best or a better be made
of an unfortunate situation. Consider this scenario. Art and Bill share an
apartment. For no good reason Art develops a strong animosity toward Bill. One
evening Art’s animosity takes over, and he steals Bill’s valuable lithographs.
Art is later found out, apprehended, and brought before Sue, the duly elected
local punishment-and-awards official. An inquiry reveals that Art is a habitual
thief with a history of unremitting parole violation. In this situation, it
seems that 14 are all true and hence mutually consistent: 1 Art steals from
Bill. 2 If Art steals from Bill, Sue ought to punish Art for stealing from
Bill. 3 It is obligatory that if Art does not steal from Bill, Sue does not
punish him for stealing from Bill. 4 Art ought not to steal from Bill. Turning
to standard deontic logic, or SDL, let sstand for ‘Art steals from Bill’ and
let p stand for ‘Sue punishes Art for stealing from Bill’. Then 14 are most
naturally represented in SDL as follows: 1a s. 2a s / Op. 3a O- s / - p. 4a O -
s. Of these, 1a and 2a entail Op by propositional logic; next, given the SDL
axiom OA / B / OA / OB, 3a implies O - s / O - p; but the latter, taken in
conjunction with 4a, entails O - p by propositional logic. In the combination
of Op, O - p, and the axiom OA / - O - A, of course, we have a formally
inconsistent set. The paradox of the knower, first presented by Lennart Bqvist
Noûs, 7, is generated by these apparent truths: first, some of us sometimes do
what we should not do; and second, there are those who are obligated to know
that such wrongful doings occur. Consider the following scenario. Jones works
as a security guard at a local store. One evening, while Jones is on duty,
Smith, a disgruntled former employee out for revenge, sets the store on fire
just a few yards away from Jones’s work station. Here it seems that 13 are all
true and thus jointly consistent: 1 Smith set the store on fire while Jones was
on duty. 2 If Smith set the store on fire while Jones was on duty, it is
obligatory that Jones knows that Smith set the store on fire. 3 Smith ought not
set the store on fire. Independently, as a consequence of the concept of
knowledge, there is the epistemic theorem that 4 The statement that Jones knows
that Smith set the store on fire entails the statement that Smith set the store
on fire. Next, within SDL 1 and 2 surely appear to imply: 5 It is obligatory that
Jones knows that Smith set the store on fire. But 4 and 5 together yield 6
Smith ought to set the store on fire, given the SDL theorem that if A / B is a
theorem, so is OA / OB. And therein resides the paradox: not only does 6 appear
false, the conjunction of 6 and 3 is formally inconsistent with the SDL axiom
OA / - O - A. The overwhelming verdict among deontic logicians is that SDL
genuinely succumbs to the deontic operator deontic paradoxes 220 220 deontic paradoxes. But it is
controversial what other approach is best followed to resolve these puzzles.
Two of the most attractive proposals are Castañeda’s two-sorted system Thinking
and Doing, 5, and the agent-and-time relativized approach of Fred Feldman
Philosophical Perspectives, 0.
Grice
on types of priority
-- Grice often uses ‘depend’ – but not clearly in what sense – there’s
ontological dependence, the basic one. dependence, in philosophy, a relation of
one of three main types: epistemic dependence, or dependence in the order of
knowing; conceptual dependence, or dependence in the order of understanding;
and ontological dependence, or dependence in the order of being. When a
relation of dependence runs in one direction only, we have a relation of
priority. For example, if wholes are ontologically dependent on their parts,
but the latter in turn are not ontologically dependent on the former, one may
say that parts are ontologically prior to wholes. The phrase ‘logical priority’
usually refers to priority of one of the three varieties to be discussed here.
Epistemic dependence. To say that the facts in some class B are epistemically
dependent on the facts in some other class A is to say this: one cannot know
any fact in B unless one knows some fact in A that serves as one’s evidence for
the fact in B. For example, it might be held that to know any fact about one’s
physical environment e.g., that there is a fire in the stove, one must know as
evidence some facts about the character of one’s own sensory experience e.g.,
that one is feeling warm and seeing flames. This would be to maintain that
facts about the physical world are epistemically dependent on facts about
sensory experience. If one held in addition that the dependence is not
reciprocal that one can know facts about
one’s sensory experience without knowing as evidence any facts about the
physical world one would be maintaining
that the former facts are epistemically prior to the latter facts. Other
plausible though sometimes disputed examples of epistemic priority are the
following: facts about the behavior of others are epistemically prior to facts
about their mental states; facts about observable objects are epistemically
prior to facts about the invisible particles postulated by physics; and
singular facts e.g., this crow is black are epistemically prior to general
facts e.g., all crows are black. Is there a class of facts on which all others
epistemically depend and that depend on no further facts in turn a bottom story in the edifice of knowledge?
Some foundationalists say yes, positing a level of basic or foundational facts
that are epistemically prior to all others. Empiricists are usually
foundationalists who maintain that the basic level consists of facts about
immediate sensory experience. Coherentists deny the need for a privileged
stratum of facts to ground the knowledge of all others; in effect, they deny
that any facts are epistemically prior to any others. Instead, all facts are on
a par, and each is known in virtue of the way in which it fits in with all the
rest. Sometimes it appears that two propositions or classes of them each
epistemically depend on the other in a vicious way to know A, you must first know B, and to know
B, you must first know A. Whenever this is genuinely the case, we are in a
skeptical predicament and cannot know either proposition. For example,
Descartes believed that he could not be assured of the reliability of his own
cognitions until he knew that God exists and is not a deceiver; yet how could
he ever come to know anything about God except by relying on his own
cognitions? This is the famous problem of the Cartesian circle. Another example
is the problem of induction as set forth by Hume: to know that induction is a
legitimate mode of inference, one would first have to know that the future will
resemble the past; but since the latter fact is establishable only by
induction, one could know it only if one already knew that induction is
legitimate. Solutions to these problems must show that contrary to first
appearances, there is a way of knowing one of the problematic propositions
independently of the other. Conceptual dependence. To say that B’s are
conceptually dependent on A’s means that to understand what a B is, you must
understand what an A is, or that the concept of a B can be explained or understood
only through the concept of an A. For example, it could plausibly be claimed
that the concept uncle can be understood only in terms of the concept male.
Empiricists typically maintain that we understand what an external thing like a
tree or a table is only by knowing what experiences it would induce in us, so
that the concepts we apply to physical things depend on the concepts we apply
to our experideontological ethics dependence 221 221 ences. They typically also maintain that
this dependence is not reciprocal, so that experiential concepts are
conceptually prior to physical concepts. Some empiricists argue from the thesis
of conceptual priority just cited to the corresponding thesis of epistemic
priority that facts about experiences
are epistemically prior to facts about external objects. Turning the tables,
some foes of empiricism maintain that the conceptual priority is the other way
about: that we can describe and understand what kind of experience we are
undergoing only by specifying what kind of object typically causes it “it’s a
smell like that of pine mulch”. Sometimes they offer this as a reason for
denying that facts about experiences are epistemically prior to facts about
physical objects. Both sides in this dispute assume that a relation of conceptual
priority in one direction excludes a relation of epistemic priority in the
opposite direction. But why couldn’t it be the case both that facts about
experiences are epistemically prior to facts about physical objects and that
concepts of physical objects are conceptually prior to concepts of experiences?
How the various kinds of priority and dependence are connected e.g., whether
conceptual priority implies epistemic priority is a matter in need of further
study. Ontological dependence. To say that entities of one sort the B’s are
ontologically dependent on entities of another sort the A’s means this: no B
can exist unless some A exists; i.e., it is logically or metaphysically
necessary that if any B exists, some A also exists. Ontological dependence may
be either specific the existence of any B depending on the existence of a
particular A or generic the existence of any B depending merely on the
existence of some A or other. If B’s are ontologically dependent on A’s, but
not conversely, we may say that A’s are ontologically prior to B’s. The
traditional notion of substance is often defined in terms of ontological
priority substances can exist without
other things, as Aristotle said, but the others cannot exist without them.
Leibniz believed that composite entities are ontologically dependent on simple
i.e., partless entities that any
composite object exists only because it has certain simple elements that are
arranged in a certain way. Berkeley, J. S. Mill, and other phenomenalists have
believed that physical objects are ontologically dependent on sensory
experiences that the existence of a
table or a tree consists in the occurrence of sensory experiences in certain
orderly patterns. Spinoza believed that all finite beings are ontologically
dependent on God and that God is ontologically dependent on nothing further;
thus God, being ontologically prior to everything else, is in Spinoza’s view
the only substance. Sometimes there are disputes about the direction in which a
relationship of ontological priority runs. Some philosophers hold that
extensionless points are prior to extended solids, others that solids are prior
to points; some say that things are prior to events, others that events are
prior to things. In the face of such disagreement, still other philosophers
such as Goodman have suggested that nothing is inherently or absolutely prior
to anything else: A’s may be prior to B’s in one conceptual scheme, B’s to A’s
in another, and there may be no saying which scheme is correct. Whether relationships
of priority hold absolutely or only relative to conceptual schemes is one issue
dividing realists and anti-realists.
de re: as opposed to de dicto, of what is said or of the
proposition, as opposed to de re, of the thing. Many philosophers believe the
following ambiguous, depending on whether they are interpreted de dicto or de
re: 1 It is possible that the number of U.S. states is even. 2 Galileo believes
that the earth moves. Assume for illustrative purposes that there are
propositions and properties. If 1 is interpreted as de dicto, it asserts that
the proposition that the number of U.S. states is even is a possible truth something true, since there are in fact fifty
states. If 1 is interpreted as de re, it asserts that the actual number of states
fifty has the property of being possibly even
something essentialism takes to be true. Similarly for 2; it may mean
that Galileo’s belief has a certain content
that the earth moves or that
Galileo believes, of the earth, that it moves. More recently, largely due to
Castañeda and John Perry, many philosophers have come to believe in de se “of
oneself” ascriptions, distinct from de dicto and de re. Suppose, while drinking
with others, I notice that someone is spilling beer. Later I come to realize
that it is I. I believed at the outset that someone was spilling beer, but
didn’t believe that I was. Once I did, I straightened my glass. The distinction
between de se and de dicto attributions is supposed to be supported by the fact
that while de dicto propositions must be either true or false, there is no true
proposition embeddable within ‘I believe that . . .’ that correctly ascribes to
me the belief that I myself am spilling beer. The sentence ‘I am spilling beer’
will not do, because it employs an “essential” indexical, ‘I’. Were I, e.g., to
designate myself other than by using ‘I’ in attributing the relevant belief to
myself, there would be no explanation of my straightening my glass. Even if I
believed de re that LePore is spilling beer, this still does not account for
why I lift my glass. For I might not know I am LePore. On the basis of such
data, some philosophers infer that de se attributions are irreducible to de re
or de dicto attributions. Internal-external
distinction – de re -- externalism, the view that there are objective reasons
for action that are not dependent on the agent’s desires, and in that sense
external to the agent. Internalism about reasons is the view that reasons for
action must be internal in the sense that they are grounded in motivational
facts about the agent, e.g. her desires and goals. Classic internalists such as
Hume deny that there are objective reasons for action. For instance, whether
the fact that an action would promote health is a reason to do it depends on
whether one has a desire to be healthy. It may be a reason for some and not for
others. The doctrine is hence a version of relativism; a fact is a reason only
insofar as it is so connected to an agent’s psychological states that it can
motivate the agent. By contrast, externalists hold that not all reasons depend
on the internal states of particular agents. Thus an externalist could hold
that promoting health is objectively good and that the fact that an action
would promote one’s health is a reason to perform it regardless of whether one
desires health. This dispute is closely tied to the debate over motivational
internalism, which may be conceived as the view that moral beliefs for instance
are, by virtue of entailing motivation, internal reasons for action. Those who
reject motivational internalism must either deny that expressive completeness
externalism 300 300 sound moral beliefs
always provide reasons for action or hold that they provide external reasons.
DE-VOLVTVM
-- In-volutum, ex-volutum – de-volutum -- The involutum/evolutum distinction,
the: evolutum:
evolutionary Grice -- Darwinism, the view that biological species evolve
primarily by means of chance variation and natural selection. Although several
important scientists prior to Charles Darwin 180982 had suggested that species
evolve and had provided mechanisms for that evolution, Darwin was the first to
set out his mechanism in sufficient detail and provide adequate empirical
grounding. Even though Darwin preferred to talk about descent with modification,
the term that rapidly came to characterize his theory was evolution. According
to Darwin, organisms vary with respect to their characteristics. In a litter of
puppies, some will be bigger, some will have longer hair, some will be more
resistant to disease, etc. Darwin termed these variations chance, not because
he thought that they were in any sense “uncaused,” but to reject any general
correlation between the variations that an organism might need and those it
gets, as Lamarck had proposed. Instead, successive generations of organisms
become adapted to their environments in a more roundabout way. Variations occur
in all directions. The organisms that happen to possess the characteristics
necessary to survive and reproduce proliferate. Those that do not either die or
leave fewer offspring. Before Darwin, an adaptation was any trait that fits an
organism to its environment. After Darwin, the term came to be limited to just
those useful traits that arose through natural selection. For example, the
sutures in the skulls of mammals make parturition easier, but they are not
adaptations in an evolutionary sense because Danto, Arthur Coleman Darwinism
204 204 they arose in ancestors that
did not give birth to live young, as is indicated by these same sutures appearing
in the skulls of egg-laying birds. Because organisms are integrated systems,
Darwin thought that adaptations had to arise through the accumulation of
numerous, small variations. As a result, evolution is gradual. Darwin himself
was unsure about how progressive biological evolution is. Organisms certainly
become better adapted to their environments through successive generations, but
as fast as organisms adapt to their environments, their environments are likely
to change. Thus, Darwinian evolution may be goal-directed, but different
species pursue different goals, and these goals keep changing. Because heredity
was so important to his theory of evolution, Darwin supplemented it with a
theory of heredity pangenesis. According
to this theory, the cells throughout the body of an organism produce numerous
tiny gemmules that find their way to the reproductive organs of the organism to
be transmitted in reproduction. An offspring receives variable numbers of
gemmules from each of its parents for each of its characteristics. For
instance, the male parent might contribute 214 gemmules for length of hair to
one offspring, 121 to another, etc., while the female parent might contribute
54 gemmules for length of hair to the first offspring and 89 to the second. As
a result, characters tend to blend. Darwin even thought that gemmules
themselves might merge, but he did not think that the merging of gemmules was
an important factor in the blending of characters. Numerous objections were
raised to Darwin’s theory in his day, and one of the most telling stemmed from
his adopting a blending theory of inheritance. As fast as natural selection
biases evolution in a particular direction, blending inheritance neutralizes
its effects. Darwin’s opponents argued that each species had its own range of
variation. Natural selection might bias the organisms belonging to a species in
a particular direction, but as a species approached its limits of variation,
additional change would become more difficult. Some special mechanism was needed
to leap over the deep, though possibly narrow, chasms that separate species.
Because a belief in biological evolution became widespread within a decade or
so after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, the tendency is
to think that it was Darwin’s view of evolution that became popular. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Darwin’s contemporaries found his theory too
materialistic and haphazard because no supernatural or teleological force
influenced evolutionary development. Darwin’s contemporaries were willing to
accept evolution, but not the sort advocated by Darwin. Although Darwin viewed
the evolution of species on the model of individual development, he did not
think that it was directed by some internal force or induced in a Lamarckian
fashion by the environment. Most Darwinians adopted just such a position. They
also argued that species arise in the space of a single generation so that the
boundaries between species remained as discrete as the creationists had
maintained. Ideal morphologists even eliminated any genuine temporal dimension
to evolution. Instead they viewed the evolution of species in the same
atemporal way that mathematicians view the transformation of an ellipse into a
circle. The revolution that Darwin instigated was in most respects
non-Darwinian. By the turn of the century, Darwinism had gone into a decided
eclipse. Darwin himself remained fairly open with respect to the mechanisms of
evolution. For example, he was willing to accept a minor role for Lamarckian
forms of inheritance, and he acknowledged that on occasion a new species might
arise quite rapidly on the model of the Ancon sheep. Several of his followers
were less flexible, rejecting all forms of Lamarckian inheritance and insisting
that evolutionary change is always gradual. Eventually Darwinism became
identified with the views of these neo-Darwinians. Thus, when Mendelian
genetics burst on the scene at the turn of the century, opponents of Darwinism
interpreted this new particulate theory of inheritance as being incompatible
with Darwin’s blending theory. The difference between Darwin’s theory of
pangenesis and Mendelian genetics, however, did not concern the existence of
hereditary particles. Gemmules were as particulate as genes. The difference lay
in numbers. According to early Mendelians, each character is controlled by a
single pair of genes. Instead of receiving a variable number of gemmules from
each parent for each character, each offspring gets a single gene from each
parent, and these genes do not in any sense blend with each other. Blue eyes
remain as blue as ever from generation to generation, even when the gene for
blue eyes resides opposite the gene for brown eyes. As the nature of heredity
was gradually worked out, biologists began to realize that a Darwinian view of
evolution could be combined with Mendelian genetics. Initially, the founders of
this later stage in the development of neoDarwinism exhibited considerable
variation in Darwinism Darwinism 205
205 their beliefs about the evolutionary process, but as they strove to
produce a single, synthetic theory, they tended to become more Darwinian than
Darwin had been. Although they acknowledged that other factors, such as the
effects of small numbers, might influence evolution, they emphasized that
natural selection is the sole directive force in evolution. It alone could
explain the complex adaptations exhibited by organisms. New species might arise
through the isolation of a few founder organisms, but from a populational
perspective, evolution was still gradual. New species do not arise in the space
of a single generation by means of “hopeful monsters” or any other
developmental means. Nor was evolution in any sense directional or progressive.
Certain lineages might become more complex for a while, but at this same time,
others would become simpler. Because biological evolution is so opportunistic,
the tree of life is highly irregular. But the united front presented by the
neo-Darwinians was in part an illusion. Differences of opinion persisted, for
instance over how heterogeneous species should be. No sooner did neo-Darwinism
become the dominant view among evolutionary biologists than voices of dissent
were raised. Currently, almost every aspect of the neo-Darwinian paradigm is
being challenged. No one proposes to reject naturalism, but those who view
themselves as opponents of neo-Darwinism urge more important roles for factors
treated as only minor by the neo-Darwinians. For example, neoDarwinians view
selection as being extremely sharp-sighted. Any inferior organism, no matter
how slightly inferior, is sure to be eliminated. Nearly all variations are
deleterious. Currently evolutionists, even those who consider themselves
Darwinians, acknowledge that a high percentage of changes at the molecular
level may be neutral with respect to survival or reproduction. On current
estimates, over 95 percent of an organism’s genes may have no function at all.
Disagreement also exists about the level of organization at which selection can
operate. Some evolutionary biologists insist that selection occurs primarily at
the level of single genes, while others think that it can have effects at
higher levels of organization, certainly at the organismic level, possibly at
the level of entire species. Some biologists emphasize the effects of
developmental constraints on the evolutionary process, while others have
discovered unexpected mechanisms such as molecular drive. How much of this
conceptual variation will become incorporated into Darwinism remains to be
seen. Evolutionary griceianism --
evolutionary epistemology, a theory of knowledge inspired by and derived from
the fact and processes of organic evolution the term was coined by the social
psychologist Donald Campbell. Most evolutionary epistemologists subscribe to
the theory of evolution through natural selection, as presented by Darwin in
the Origin of Species 1859. However, one does find variants, especially one
based on some kind of neoLamarckism, where the inheritance of acquired
characters is central Spencer endorsed this view and another based on some kind
of jerky or “saltationary” evolutionism Thomas Kuhn, at the end of The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, accepts this idea. There are two
approaches to evolutionary epistemology. First, one can think of the
transformation of organisms and the processes driving such change as an analogy
for the growth of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge. “Darwin’s
bulldog,” T. H. Huxley, was one of the first to propose this idea. He argued
that just as between organisms we have a struggle for existence, leading to the
selection of the fittest, so between scientific ideas we have a struggle
leading to a selection of the fittest. Notable exponents of this view today
include Stephen Toulmin, who has worked through the analogy in some detail, and
David Hull, who brings a sensitive sociological perspective to bear on the
position. Karl Popper identifies with this form of evolutionary epistemology,
arguing that the selection of ideas is his view of science as bold conjecture
and rigorous attempt at refutation by another name. The problem with this
analogical type of evolutionary epistemology lies in the disanalogy between the
raw variants of biology mutations, which are random, and the raw variants of
science new hypotheses, which are very rarely random. This difference probably
accounts for the fact that whereas Darwinian evolution is not genuinely
progressive, science is or seems to be the paradigm of a progressive
enterprise. Because of this problem, a second set of epistemologists inspired
by evolution insist that one must take the biology literally. This evidence of
the senses evolutionary epistemology 294
294 group, which includes Darwin, who speculated in this way even in his
earliest notebooks, claims that evolution predisposes us to think in certain
fixed adaptive patterns. The laws of logic, e.g., as well as mathematics and
the methodological dictates of science, have their foundations in the fact that
those of our would-be ancestors who took them seriously survived and
reproduced, and those that did not did not. No one claims that we have innate
knowledge of the kind demolished by Locke. Rather, our thinking is channeled in
certain directions by our biology. In an update of the biogenetic law, therefore,
one might say that whereas a claim like 5 ! 7 % 12 is phylogenetically a
posteriori, it is ontogenetically a priori. A major division in this school is
between the continental evolutionists, most notably the late Konrad Lorenz, and
the Anglo-Saxon supporters, e.g. Michael Ruse. The former think that their
evolutionary epistemology simply updates the critical philosophy of Kant, and
that biology both explains the necessity of the synthetic a priori and makes
reasonable belief in the thing-in-itself. The latter deny that one can ever get
that necessity, certainly not from biology, or that evolution makes reasonable
a belief in an objectively real world, independent of our knowing.
Historically, these epistemologists look to Hume and in some respects to the pragmatists, especially William James. Today,
they acknowledge a strong family resemblance to such naturalized
epistemologists as Quine, who has endorsed a kind of evolutionary epistemology.
Critics of this position, e.g. Philip Kitcher, usually strike at what they see
as the soft scientific underbelly. They argue that the belief that the mind is
constructed according to various innate adaptive channels is without warrant.
It is but one more manifestation of today’s Darwinians illicitly seeing
adaptation everywhere. It is better and more reasonable to think knowledge is
rooted in culture, if it is person-dependent at all. A mark of a good
philosophy, like a good science, is that it opens up new avenues for research.
Although evolutionary epistemology is not favored by conventional philosophers,
who sneer at the crudities of its frequently nonphilosophically trained
proselytizers, its supporters feel convinced that they are contributing to a
forward-moving philosophical research program. As evolutionists, they are used
to things taking time to succeed. -- evolutionary psychology, the subfield of
psychology that explains human behavior and cultural arrangements by employing
evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology to discover, catalog, and analyze
psychological mechanisms. Human minds allegedly possess many innate,
special-purpose, domain-specific psychological mechanisms modules whose
development requires minimal input and whose operations are context-sensitive,
mostly automatic, and independent of one another and of general intelligence.
Disagreements persist about the functional isolation and innateness of these
modules. Some evolutionary psychologists compare the mind with its specialized modules to a Swiss army knife. Different modules
substantially constrain behavior and cognition associated with language,
sociality, face recognition, and so on. Evolutionary psychologists emphasize
that psychological phenomena reflect the influence of biological evolution.
These modules and associated behavior patterns assumed their forms during the
Pleistocene. An evolutionary perspective identifies adaptive problems and
features of the Pleistocene environment that constrained possible solutions.
Adaptive problems often have cognitive dimensions. For example, an evolutionary
imperative to aid kin presumes the ability to detect kin. Evolutionary
psychologists propose models to meet the requisite cognitive demands. Plausible
models should produce adaptive behaviors and avoid maladaptive ones e.g., generating too many false positives
when identifying kin. Experimental psychological evidence and social scientific
field observations aid assessment of these proposals. These modules have
changed little. Modern humans manage with primitive hunter-gatherers’ cognitive
equipment amid the rapid cultural change that equipment produces. The pace of
that change outstrips the ability of biological evolution to keep up.
Evolutionary psychologists hold, consequently, that: 1 contrary to
sociobiology, which appeals to biological evolution directly, exclusively
evolutionary explanations of human behavior will not suffice; 2 contrary to
theories of cultural evolution, which appeal to biological evolution
analogically, it is at least possible that no cultural arrangement has ever
been adaptive; and 3 contrary to social scientists, who appeal to some general
conception of learning or socialization to explain cultural transmission,
specialized psychological evolutionary ethics evolutionary psychology 295 295 mechanisms contribute substantially to
that process.
descriptum: Grice: “The root
script provides many niceties in Roman: inscriptum, descriptum, prescriptum,
subscriptum, … -- descriptivism, the thesis that the meaning of any evaluative
statement is purely descriptive or factual, i.e., determined, apart from its
syntactical features, entirely by its truth conditions. Nondescriptivism of
which emotivism and prescriptivism are the main varieties is the view that the
meaning of full-blooded evaluative statements is such that they necessarily
express the speaker’s sentiments or commitments. Nonnaturalism, naturalism, and
supernaturalism are descriptivist views about the nature of the properties to
which the meaning rules refer. Descriptivism is related to cognitivism and
moral realism. Discussed at large by
Grice just because his tutee, P. F. Strawson, showed an interst in it. theory
of descriptions, an analysis, initially developed by Peano, and borrowed from
(but never returned to) Peano by Russell, of sentences containing descriptions.
In Peano’s view, it’s about the ‘article,’ definite (‘the’) and ‘indefinite’
(‘some (at least one).’ Descriptions include indefinite descriptions such as
‘an elephant’ and definite descriptions such as ‘the positive square root of
four’. On Russell’s analysis, descriptions are “incomplete symbols” that are
meaningful only in the context of other symbols, i.e., only in the context of
the sentences containing them. Although the words ‘the first president of the
United States’ appear to constitute a singular term that picks out a particular
individual, much as the name ‘George Washington’ does, Russell held that
descriptions are not referring expressions, and that they are “analyzed out” in
a proper specification of the logical form of the sentences in which they
occur. The grammatical form of ‘The first president of the United States is
tall’ is simply misleading as to its logical form. According to Russell’s
analysis of indefinite descriptions, the sentence ‘I saw a man’ asserts that
there is at least one thing that is a man, and I saw that thing symbolically, Ex Mx & Sx. The role of the
apparent singular term ‘a man’ is taken over by the existential quantifier ‘Ex’
and the variables it binds, and the apparent singular term disappears on
analysis. A sentence containing a definite description, such as ‘The present
king of France is bald’, is taken to make three claims: that at least one thing
is a present king of France, that at most one thing is a present king of
France, and that that thing is bald
symbolically, Ex {[Fx & y Fy / y % x] & Bx}. Again, the apparent
referring expression ‘the present king of France’ is analyzed away, with its
role carried out by the quantifiers and variables in the symbolic
representation of the logical form of the sentence in which it occurs. No
element in that representation is a singular referring expression. Russell held
that this analysis solves at least three difficult puzzles posed by
descriptions. The first is how it could be true that George IV wished to know
whether Scott was the author of Waverly, but false that George IV wished to
know whether Scott was Scott. Since Scott is the author of Waverly, we should
apparently be able to substitute ‘Scott’ for ‘the author of Waverly’ and infer
the second sentence from the first, but we cannot. On Russell’s analysis,
‘George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverly’ does not,
when properly understood, contain an expression ‘the author of Waverly’ for
which the name ‘Scott’ can be substituted. The second puzzle concerns the law
of excluded middle, which rules that either ‘The present king of France is
bald’ or ‘The present king of France is not bald’ must be true; the problem is
that neither the list of bald men nor that of non-bald men contains an entry
for the present king of France. Russell’s solution is that ‘The present king of
France is not bald’ is indeed true if it is understood as ‘It is not the case
that there is exactly one thing that is now King of France and is bald’, i.e.,
as -Ex {Fx & y {[Fy / y % x] & Bx}. The final puzzle is how ‘There is
no present king of France’ or ‘The present king of France does not exist’ can
be true if ‘the present king of France’
is a referring expression that picks out something, how can we truly deny that
that thing exists? Since descriptions are not referring expressions on
Russell’s theory, it is easy for him to show that the negation of the claim
that there is at least and at most i.e., exactly one present king of France,
-Ex [Fx & y Fy / y % x], is true. Strawson offered the first real challenge
to Russell’s theory, arguing that ‘The present king of France is bald’ does not
entail but instead presupposes ‘There is a present king of France’, so that the
former is not falsified by the falsity of the latter, but is instead deprived
of a truth-value. Strawson argued for the natural view that definite
descriptions are indeed referring expressions, used to single something out for
predication. More recently, Keith Donnellan argued that both Russell and
Strawson ignored the fact that definite descriptions have two uses. Used
attributively, a definite description is intended to say something about
whatever it is true of, and when a sentence is so used it conforms to Russell’s
analysis. Used referentially, a definite description is intended to single
something out, but may not correctly describe it. For example, seeing an
inebriated man in a policeman’s uniform, one might say, “The cop on the corner
is drunk!” Donnellan would say that even if the person were a drunken actor
dressed as a policeman, the speaker would have referred to him and truly said
of him that he was drunk. If it is for some reason crucial that the description
be correct, as it might be if one said, “The cop on the corner has the
authority to issue speeding tickets,” the use is attributive; and because ‘the
cop on the corner’ does not describe anyone correctly, no one has been said to
have the authority to issue speeding tickets. Donnellan criticized Russell for
overlooking referential uses of theory of descriptions theory of descriptions
914 914 descriptions, and Strawson for
both failing to acknowledge attributive uses and maintaining that with
referential uses one can refer to something with a definite description only if
the description is true of it. Discussion of Strawson’s and Donnellan’s
criticisms is ongoing, and has provoked very useful work in both semantics and
speech act theory, and on the distinctions between semantics and pragmatics and
between semantic reference and speaker’s reference, among others. .
de sensu implicaturum: vide casus obliquus. The casus rectus/casus obliquus
distinction. Peter Abelard, Kneale, Grice, Aristotle. Aquinas. de sensu implicaturum.
Ariskantian quessertions on de sensu implicate. “My sometimes mischievous friend Richard Grandy once said, in
connection with some other occasion on which I was talking, that to represent
my remarks, it would be necessary to introduce a new form of speech act,
or a new operator, which
was to be called the operator of quessertion. It is to be read as “It is
perhaps possible that someone might assert that . . .” and is to be symbolized
“?├”; possibly it might even be iterable […].
Everything I shall suggest here is highly quessertable.” Grice 1989:297. If Grice had one thing, he had linguistic creativity.
Witness his ‘implicaturum,’ and his ‘implicaturum,’ not to mention his
‘pirotologia.’Sometime, somewhere, in the history of philosophy, a need was
felt by some Griceian philosopher, surely, for numbering intentions. The verb,
denoting the activity, out of which this ‘intention’ sprang was Latin
‘intendere,’ and somewhere, sometime, the need was felt to keep the Latinate
/t/ sound, and sometimes to make it sibilate, /s/. The source of it all seems to be Aristotle in
Soph.
Elen., 166a24–166a30, which was rendered twice om Grecian to Latin. In the
second Latinisation, ‘de sensu’ comes into view. Abelard proposes to use ‘de
rebus,’ or ‘de re,’ for what the previous translation had as ‘per divisionem.’
To make the distinction, he also proposes to use ‘de sensu’ for what the
previous translation has as ‘per compositionem,’ and ‘per conjunctionem.’ But
what did either mean? It was a subtle question, indeed. And trust Nicolai
Hartmann, in his mediaevalist revival, to add numbers and a further distinction,
now the ‘recte/’oblique’ distinction, and ‘intentio’ being ‘prima,’ ‘seconda,’
‘tertia,’ and so on, ad infinitum. The proposal is clear. We need a way to
conceptualise first-order propositions. But we also need to conceptualise
‘that’-clauses. The ‘that’-clause subordination is indeed open-ended. ‘mean.’ Grice’s
motivation in the presentation at the Oxford Philosophical Society is to offer,
as he calls it, a ‘proposal.’ In his words, notice the emphasis on the Latinate
‘intend,’ – where it occurs, as applied to an emissor, and as having as
content, following that ‘that’-clause, an ‘intensional’ verb like ‘believe,’
which again, involves an ‘intentio tertia,’ now referring to a state back in
the emissor expressed by yet another intensional verb – all long for, ‘you
communicate that p if you want your addressee to realise that you hold this or
that propositional attitude with content p.’
"A
meantNN something by x" is (roughly) equivalent to "A intended the
utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the
recognition of this intention"; and we may add that to ask what A meant is
to ask for a specification of the intended effect (though, of course, it may
not always be possible to get a straight answer involving a "that"
clause, for example, "a belief that . . ."). (Grice 1989: 220). Grice’s motivation
is to ‘reduce’ “mean” to what has come to be known in the Griceian [sic]
literature as a ‘Griceian’ [sic] ‘reflexive’ intention – he prefers M-intention
-- which we will read as involving an intentio seconda, and indeed intentio
tertia, and beyond, which makes its appearance explicitly in the second clause
-- or ‘prong,’ as he’d prefer -- of his ‘reductive’ analysis. Prong 1 then
corresponds to the intention prima or intention recta: Utterer U intends1
that Addressee A believes that Utterer U holds psychological state or attitude
ψ with content “p.” Prong 2 corresponds to the intentio seconda or
intentio obliqua: Utterer
U intends2 that Addressee A believes (i) on the ‘rational,’ and not
just ‘causal,’ basis of (ii), i.e. of the addressee A’s recognition of the
utterer U’s intentio seconda or intentio obliqua i2, that Addressee
A comes to believe that Utterer U holds psychological state or attitude ψ with
content “p.” In Grice’s wording, “i2” acts as a ‘reason,’ and not
merely a ‘cause’ for Addressee A’s coming to believe that U holds psychological
state or attitude ψ with content “p”. Kemmerling has used “↝” to represent this
‘reason’ (i1 ↝ i2,
Kemmerling in Grandy/Warner, 1986, cf. Petrus in Petrus 2010). Prong 3 is a
closure prong, now involving a self-reflective third-order intention, there is
no ‘covert’ higher-order intention involved in (i)-(iii). Meaning-constitutive
intentions in utterer u’s meaning that p should be out there ‘in the open,’ or
‘above board,’ to count as having been ‘communicated.Grice quotes only one
author in ‘Meaning’: C. L. Stevenson, who started his career with a degree in
English from Yale. Willing to allow a ‘metabolical’ use of ‘mean’ he
recognises, he scare quotes it: “There is a
sense, to be sure, in which a groan “means“ something, just a reduced
temperature may at times ”mean” convalescence.” Stevenson 1944:38). This
remark will have Grice later attempting an ‘evolutionary’ model of how an ‘x’
causing ‘y’ may proceed from ‘natural’ to less natural ones. Consider ‘is in
pain.’ A creature is physically hurt, and the expression of pain comes up
naturally as an effect. But if the creature attains rational control over his
expressive behaviour, and the creature is in pain (or expects his addressee A
to think that he is in pain), U can now imitate or replicate, in a something
like a Peirceian iconic mode, the natural behaviour manifested by a spontaneous
response to a hurtful stimulus. The ‘simulated’ pain will be an ‘icon’ of the
natural pain. Grice is getting Peirceian by the day, and he is not telling us!
There are, Grice says, as if to simplify Peirce the most he can, two modes of
representation. The primary one is now the explicitly Peirceian iconic one. The
‘risus naturaliter significat interiorem laetitiam’ of Occam. And then, there’s
the derivative *non*-iconic representation, in that order. The first is, shall
we say, ‘natural,’ and beyond the utterer U’s voluntary control (cf. Darwin on
the expression of emotions in man and animals); the second is not. Grice is
allowing for smoke representing fire, or if one must, alla Stevenson,
‘representing’ it. In Grice’s motivation to along the right lines, his
psychologist austere views of his 1948 ‘Meaning,’ when he rather artificially
disjoins a ‘natural’ “mean” and an ‘artificial’ “mean,” when merely different
‘uses’ stand for what he then thought were senses, he wants now to re-introduce
into philosophical discourse the iconic natural representation or meaning that
he had left aside.If this is part of what he calls a ‘myth,’ even if an
evolutionary one, to account for the emergence of ‘systems of communication,’
it does starts with an utterer U expressing (very much alla Croce or Marty) a
psychological state or attitude ψ by displaying some behavioural pattern in an
unintentional way. Grice is being Wittgensteinian here, and quotes almost
verbatim from Anscombe’s rendition, “No psychological concept except when
backed in behaviour that manifests it.”
If Ockham notes that “Risus naturaliter significat interiorem laetitiam,”
Grice shows this will allow to avoid, also alla Ockham, a polysemy to ‘mean.’In
Grice’s three clauses in his 1948 conceptual analysis of ‘meaning’ – the first
clause of exhibitiveness, the second clause of intentio seconda or reflexivity,
and the third clause of communicative overtness, voluntary control on the part
of the utterer U is already in order. Since the utterer’s addressee A is
intended to recognise this, no longer is it required any prior ‘iconic’
association between a simulated behaviour and the behaviour naturally displayed
as a response to a stimulus. This amounts, for Grice to deeming the system of
expression as having become a full system now of intention-based
‘communication.’‘know’’ Intentio seconda or intentio obliqua comes up nicely
when Grice delivers the third William James Lecture, later reprinted as
“Further notes on logic and conversation.” There, Grice targets one type of
anti-Gettier scenario for the use of a factive psychological state or attitude
expressed by a verb like “know,” again followed by a “that”-clause. Grice is
criticisign Austin’s hasty attempt to analyse ‘know’ in terms of the
‘performatory’ ‘guarantee.’ As Grice puts it in “Prolegomena,” “to say ‘I know’
is to give a guarantee.” (Grice 1989:9) which can be traced back to Austin,
although since, as Grice witnessed it, Austin ‘all too frequently ignored’ the
real of emissor’s communicatum, one is never sure. In any case, Grice wants to overcome this
‘performatory’ fallacy, and he expands on the ‘suspect’ example of the
Prolegomena in the Third lecture. Grice’s troubles with ‘know’ were long-dated.
In Causal Theory he lists as the third philosophical mistake, “What is known by
me to be the case is not also believed by me to be the case.” (1989: 237).
Uncredited, but he may be having in mind Ryle’s odd characterisations with
terms such as ‘occurrence,’ ‘episode,’ and so on. In the section on ‘stress,’ Grice asks us to
assume that Grice knows that p. The question is whether this claim commits the
philosopher to the further clause, ‘Grice knows that Grice knows that p, and so
on, … to use the scholastic term we started this with, ad infinitum. It is not
that Grice is adverse to a regressive analysis per se. This is, in effect, with
what the third clause or prong in his analysis of ‘meaning’ does – ‘let all
meaning-constitutive intentions be overt, including this one. Indeed, when it comes to meaning or knowing,
we are talking optimal, we are talking ‘virtue.’ Both ‘meaning,’
‘communicating, ‘and ‘knowing,’ represent an ‘ideal,’ value-paradeigmatic concept
– where value, a favourite with Hartmann, appears under the guise of a noumenon
in the topos ouranos that only realises imperfectly in the sub-lunary world. In
the third William James lecture Grice cursorily dismisses these demanding or
restrictive anti-Gettier scenarios as too stipulatory for the colloquial,
ordinary, use – and thus ‘sense’ -- of ‘know.’ The approach Gettier is
cricising ends up being too convoluted, seeing that conversationalists tend to
make a rather loose use of the verb. Grice’s example illustrates linguistic
botanising. So we have Grice bringing the examinee who does know that the
battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815, with hardly conclusive evidence, or any
‘de sensu’ knowledge that the evidence (which he does not have) is conclusive.
Grice grants that, in a specially emphatic utterance of ‘know,’ there might be
a cancellable implicaturum to the effect that the knower does have conclusive
evidence for what he alleges to know. Grice’s explicit reference to this
‘regressive nature’ (p. 59) touches on the topic of intention de sensu. Grice
is contesting the strong view, as represented, according to Gettier, by
philosophers ranging from Plato’s Thaetetus to Ayer’s Problem of Empirical
Knowledge (indeed the only two loci Gettier cares to cite in his short essay)
that a claim, “Grice knows that p” entails a claim to the effect that there is
conclusive evidence for p, and which gives Grice a feeling of subjective
certainty, and that Grice knows that there is such conclusive evidence, and so on,
ad infinitum. Grice casts doubts on the intentio de sensu as applied to the
colloquial or ‘ordinary’ uses of ‘know’. If I know that p, must I know that I
know that p? Having just introduced his
“Modified Occam’s Razor” – ‘Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’
--, Grice doesn’t think so. At this point, however, he adds a characteristic
bracket: “(cf. causal theory).” With that bracket, Grice is allowing that the
denotatum of “p,” qua content of U’s psychological state or attitude of ‘knowing,’
the state-of-affairs itself, as we may put it, should play something like a
causal role in U’s knowing that p. Grice is open-minded as to what type of link
or connection that is. It need not be strictly causal. He is merely suggesting
the open-endness of ‘know in terms of these “further conditions” as to how
Grice ‘comes’ to know that p, and refers to the ‘causal theory,’ as later
developed by philosophers like E. F. Dretske and others. As a linguistic
botanist, Grice is well aware that ‘know,’ like ‘see,’ is what the Kiparskys
(whom Grice refers to) call a ‘factive.’An ascription of “Grice knows that p,”
or, indeed, “Grice sees that p,” (unless Grice hallucinates) entails “p.” The
defeating ‘hallucination’ scenario is key. It involves what Grice calls a dis-implicaturum.
The utterer is using ‘know’ or‘see’ in a loose way (and meaning less, rather
than more than he explicitly conveys. Note incidentally, as Grice later noted
in later seminars, how his analysis proves the philosopher’s adage wrong.
Surely what is known by me to be the case is believed by me to be the case. Any
divergence to the contrary is a matter of ‘implicatural’ stress – by which he
means supra-segmentation.‘want’Soon after his delivering the William James
lectures, Grice got involved in a project concerning an evaluation of Quine’s
programme, where again he touches on issues of intentio seconda or intentio
obliqua, and brings us back to Russell and ‘the author of Waverley.’ Grice’s
presentation comes out in Words and Objections, edited by Davidson and
Hintikka, a pun on Quine’s Word and Object. Grice’s contribution, ‘Vacuous
Names,’ (later reprinted in part in Ostertag’s volume on Definite descriptions)
concludes with an exploration of “the” phrases, and further on, with some
intriguing remarks on the subtle issues surrounding the scope of an ascription
of a predicate standing for a psychological state or attitude. Grice’s choice
of an ascription now notably involves an ‘opaque’ (rather than ‘factive,’ like
‘know’) psychological state or attitude: ‘wanting,’ which he symbolizes as “W.”
Grice considers a quartet of utterances: Jack wants someone to marry him; Jack
wants someone or other to marry him; Jack wants a particular person to marry
him, and There is someone whom Jack wants to marry him. Grice notes that “there
are clearly at least *two* possible readings” of an utterance like our (i): a
first reading “in which,” as Grice puts it, (i) might be paraphrased by (ii).”
A second reading is one “in which it might be paraphrased by (iii) or by (iv).”
Grice goes on to symbolize the phenomenon in his own version of a first-order
predicate calculus. ‘Ja wants that p’ becomes ‘Wjap,’ where ‘ja’
stands for the individual constant “Jack” as a super-script attached to the
predicate standing for Jack’s psychological state or attitude. Grice writes:
“Using the apparatus of classical predicate logic, we might hope to represent,”
respectively, the external reading and the internal reading (involving an
intentio secunda or intentio obliqua) as ‘(Ǝx)WjaFxja’
and ‘Wja(Ǝx)Fxja.’ Grice then
goes on to discuss a slightly more complex, or oblique, scenario involving this
second internal reading, which is the one that interests us, as it involves an
‘intentio seconda.’ Grice notes: “But suppose that Jack wants a specific
individual, Jill, to marry him, and this because Jack has been “*deceived* into
thinking that his friend Joe has a highly delectable sister called Jill, though
in fact Joe is an only child.” (The Jill Jack eventually goes up the hill with
is, coincidentally, another Jill, possibly existent). Let us recall that
Grice’s main focus of the whole essay is, as the title goes, ‘emptiness’! In
these circumstances, one is inclined to say that (i) is true only on reading
(vii),” where the existential quantifier occurs within the scope of the
psychological-state or -attitude verb, “but we cannot now represent (ii) or
(iii), with ‘Jill’ being vacuous, by (vi), where the existential quantifier (Ǝx) occurs outside the scope of the
psychological-attitude verb, want, “since [well,] Jill does not really exist,”
except as a figment of Jack’s imagination. In a manoeuver that I interpret as
‘purely intentionalist,’ and thus favouring by far Suppes’s over Chomsky’s
characterisation of Grice as a mere ‘behaviourist,’ Grice hopes that “we should
be provided with distinct representations for two familiar readings” of, now:
Jack wants Jill to marry him; Jack wants ‘Jill’ to marry him. It is at this
point that Grice applies a syntactic scope notation involving sub-scripted numerals,
(ix) and (x), where the numeric values merely indicate the order of
introduction of the symbol to which it is attached in a deductive schema for
the predicate calculus in question. Only the first notation yields the internal
de sensu reading (where ‘ji’ stands for ‘Jill’): ‘W2ja4F1ji3ja4’
and ‘W3ja4F2ji1ja4.’
Note that in the alternative external notation, the individual constant for
“Jill,” ‘ji,’ is introduced prior to ‘want,’ – ‘ji’’s sub-script is 1, while
‘W’’s sub-script is the higher numerical value 3. If Russell could have avowed
of this he would have had that the Prince Regents, by issuing the invitation,
wants to confirm that ‘the author of Waverley’ isN Scott, already having
confirmed that the author of Waverley =M the author of Waverley. Grice warns
Quine. Given that Jill does not exist, only the internal reading “can be true,”
or alethically satisfactory. Similarly, we might imagine an alternative
scenario where the butler informs the Prince: ‘We are sorry to inform Your
Majesty that your invitation was returned: apparently the author of Waverley
does not SEEM to exist.’ Grice sums up his reflections on the representation of
the opaqueness of a verb standing for a psychological state or attitude like
that expressed by ‘wanting’ with one observation that further marks him as an
intentionalist, almost of a Meinongian type. If he justified a loose use of
‘know,’ he is now is ready to allow for ‘existential’ phrases in cases of
‘vacuous’ designata, which however baffling, should not lead a philosopher to
the wrong characterisation of the linguistic phenomena (as it led Austin with
‘know’). Provided such a descriptors occur within an opaque, intensional, de
sensu, psychological-state or attitude verbs, Grice captures the nuances of
‘ordinary’ discourse, while keeping Quine happy. As Grice puts it, we should
also have available to us also three neutral, yet distinct, (Ǝx)-quantificational forms (together with their
isomorphs),” as a philosopher who thinks that Wittgenstein denies a
distinction, craves for a generality! “Jill” now becomes “x”: ‘W4ja5Ǝx3F1x2ja5,’
‘Ǝx5W2ja5F1x4ja3’,
and ‘Ǝx5W3ja4F1x2ja4
.’ Since in (xii) the individual variable ‘x’ (ranging over ‘Jill’) “does not
dominate the segment following the ‘(Ǝx)’
quantifier, the formulation does not display any ‘existential’ or de re,
‘force,’ and is suitable therefore for representing the internal readings (ii)
or (iii), “if we have to allow, as we do have, if we want to faithfully
represent ‘ordinary’ discourse, for the possibility of expressing the fact that
a particular person, Jill, does not actually exist.” At least Grice does not
write, “really,” for he knew that Austin detested a ‘trouser word.’ Grice
concludes that (xi) and (xiii) are derivable from each of (ix) and (x), while
(xii) will be “derivable only” from (ix).‘intend’By this time, Grice had been
made a Fellow of the British Academy and it was about time for the delivery of
the philosophical lecture that goes with it. It only took him six five years.
Grice choses “Intention and uncertainty” as its topic. He was provoked by two
members of his ‘playgroup’ at Oxford, Hart and Hampshire, who in an essay
published in Mind, what Grice finds, again, as he did with the anti-Gettier
cases of ‘know,’ as rather a too strong analysis of ‘intending.’ In his
British-Academy lecture, Grice plays now with the psychological state or
attitude, realised by the verbal form, ‘intend,’ when specifically followed by
a ‘that’-clause, “intends that…,” as an echo of his dealing with “meaning to”
as merely ‘natural.’ He calls himself a neo-Prichardian, reviving this ‘willing
that’ which Urmson had popularised at Oxford, bringing to publication
Prichard’s exploration of William James and his “I will that the distant chair
slides over the floor towards me. It does not.”Grice’s ‘intending that…’ is
notably a practical, boulemaic, or buletic, or desiderative, rather than
alethic or doxastic, psychological state or attitude. It involves not just an
itentum, but an intentum that involves both a desideratum AND a factum – for
the ‘future indicative’ is conceptually involved. Grice claims that, if the
conceptual analysis of “intending that…” is to represent ‘ordinary’ discourse,
shows that it contains, as one of its prongs, in the final ‘neo-Prichardian’
version that Grice gives, also a ‘doxastic’ (rather than ‘factive’ and
‘epistemic’) psychological state or attitude, notably a belief on the part of
the ‘intender’ that his willing that p has a probability greater than 0.5 to
the effect that p be realised. Contra Hart and Hampshire, Grice acknowledges
the investigations by the playgroup member Pears on this topic. Interestingly,
a polemic arose elsewhere with Davidson, who trying to be more Griceian thatn
Grice, sees this doxastic constraint as a mere cancellable implicaturum. Grice
grants it may be a dis-implicaturum at most, as in loose cases of ‘know,’ or
‘see.’ Grice is adamant in regarding the doxastic component as a conceptual
‘entailment’ in the ‘ordinary’ use of ‘intend,’ unless the verb is used in a
merely ‘disimplicatural,’ loose fashion. Grice’s example, ‘Jill intends to
climb Everest next week,’ when the prohibitive conditions are all to evident to
anyone concerned with such an utterance of (xv), perhaps Jill included, and
‘intends’ has to be read only ‘internally’ and hyperbolically. At this point,
if in “Vacuous Names, he fights with Meinong while enjoying engaging in
emptiness, it should be stressed that Grice gives as an illustration of a ‘disimplicaturum,’
along with a use of ‘see’ in a Shakespeareian context. ‘See,’ like ‘know,’ or ‘mean,’ exhibit what
Grice calls diaphaneity. So it’s only natural Grice turns his attention to
‘see.’ Grice’s examples are ‘Macbeth saw Banquo’ and ‘Hamlet saw his father on
the ramparts of Elsinore,’ and both involve hallucination! It is worth
comparing the fortune of ‘disimplicaturum’ with that of ‘implicaturum.’ Grice
coins ‘to dis-implicate’ as an active verb, for a case where the utterer does
NOT, as in the case of implicaturum, mean MORE than he says, but LESS. Grice’s
point is a subtle one. It involves his concession on something like an
explicatum, but alsoo on something like Moore’s entailment. If the ‘doxastic
condition’ is entailed by “intending that…,’ an utterer U may STILL use, in an
‘ordinary’ fashion, a strong ‘intending that…’ in a scenario where it is common
ground between the utterer U and his addressee A that the probability of ‘p’
being realised is lower than 0.5. The expression of the psychological state or
attitude is loose, since the utterer is, as it were, dropping an ‘entailment’
that applies in a use of ‘intending that’ where that ‘common-ground’ assumption
is absent. One reason may be echoic. Jill may think that she can succeed in
climbing Mt. Everest; she herself has used ‘intend.’ When that information is transmitted,
the strong psychological verb is kept when the doxastic constraint is no longer
shared by the utterer U and his addressee A (Like an implicaturum, a disimplicaturum
has to be recognised as such to count as one.
No such thing as an ‘unwanted’ disimplicaturum.‘motivate’Sometimes, it
would seem that, for Grice, the English philosopher of English
‘ordinary-language’ philosophy, English is not enough! Grice would amuse at
Berkeley seminars, with things like, ‘A pirot potches o as fang, or potches o
and o’ as F-id,’ just to attract his addressee’s attention. The full passage,
in what Grice calls, after Carnap, pirotese, reads: “A pirot can be said to
potch of some obble x as fang or feng; also to cotch of x, or some obble o, as
fang or feng; or to cotch of one obble o and another obble o’ as being fid to
one another.” Grice’s deciphering, with ‘pirot,” a tribute to Carnap – and
Locke -- as any agent, and an ‘obble’ as an object. Grice borrows, but does not
return, the ‘pirot’ from Carnap (for whom pirots karulise elatically – Carnap’s
example of a syntactically well-formed formula in Introduction to Semantics).
Grice uses ‘pirotese’ ‘to potch’ as a correlate for ‘perceive,’ such as the
factive ‘see’ and ‘to cotch’ as a correlate for the similarly factive
‘know.’While ‘perceive’ strictly allows for a ‘that’-clause (as in Grice
analysis of “I perceive that the pillar box is red” in “The causal theory of
perception”), for simplificatory purposes, Grice is using ‘to potch’ as
applying directly to an object, which Grice rephrases as an ‘obble.’ Since some
perceptual feature or other is required in a predication of ‘perceiving’ and
‘potching,’ ‘feng’ is introduced as a perceptual predicate. And since pirots
should also be allowed to perceive an ‘obble’ o in some relation with another
‘obble’ o2, Grice introduces the dyadic ‘relational’ feature ‘fid.’ Grice’s exegesis reads: “‘To potch’ is
something like ‘to perceive,’ whereas ‘to cotch’ is something like ‘to think.’
‘Feng’ and ‘fang’ are possible descriptions, much like our adjectives; ‘fid’ is
a possible relation between ‘obbles.’”).
At this point, Grice has been made, trans-territorially, the President
of the American Philosophical Association, and is ready to give his
Presidential Address (now reprinted in his Conception of Value, for Clarendon.
He chooses ‘philosophical psychology’ It’s when Grice goes on to play now with
the neo-Wittgensteinian issues of incorrigibility and privileged access, that
issues of intentio seconda become prominent.
For any psychological attitude ψ1, if U holds it, U holds, as
a matter of what Grice calls ‘genitorial construction,’ a meta-psychological
attitude, ψ2, a seconda intentio if ever there was one, -- Grice
even uses the numeral ‘2’ -- that has, as its content followed the second
‘that’-clause, the very first psychological attitude ψ1. The general
schema being given below, with an instance of specification: ‘ψup ⊃ ψuψup,’
and ‘if U wills that p, U wills that U wills that p.’ The interesting bit, from
the perspective of our exploration of ‘intentio seconda,’ is that, if, alla
Peano, we apply this to itself, as in the anti-Gettier cases Grice discussed
earlier, we end with an ad-infinitum clause. It was Judith Baker, who earned
her doctorate under Grice at Berkeley who sees this clearlier than everyone
(She was a regular contributor to the Kant Society in Germany). Baker’s
publications are, like those of her tutor, scarce. But in a delightful
contribution to the Grice festschrift, “Do one’s motives have to be pure?” (in
Grandy/Warner 1986), Baker explores the crucial importance of that ad-infinitum
chain of intentiones secondæ as it applies to questions of not alethic but
practical value or satisfactoriness. Consider ‘ought’. Grice would say that
‘must’ is aequi-vocal, i.e. it is not that ‘must’ has an alethic ‘sense’ and a
practical ‘sense.’ Only “one” must, if one must! (As Grice jokes, “Who needs
ichthyological necessity?”). Baker notes
that the ad-infinitum chain may explain how ‘duty’ ‘cashes out’ in ‘interest.’
Both Grice and Baker are avowed Kantotelians. By allowing ‘duty’ to cash out in
interest they are merging Aristotle’s utilitarian teleology with Kant’s
deontology, and succeeding! It is possible to symbolize Grice’s and Baker’s
proposal. If there is a “p” SUCH AS, at some point in the iteration of willing
and intentiones secondæ, the agent is not willing to accept it, this blocks the
potential Kantian universalizability of the content of a teleological attitude
“p,” stripping “p” of any absolute value status that it may otherwise attain.In
Grice’s reductive analysis of ‘mean,’ ‘know,’ ‘want,’ ‘intend,’ and ‘motivate,’
we witness the subtlety of his approach that is only made possible from the
recognition of Aristotle’s insight back in “De Sophisticis Elenchis” to Kant’s
explorations on the purity of motives. It should not surprise us. It’s Grice’s
nod, no doubt, to an unjustly neglected philosopher, who should be neglected no
more.ReferencesBlackburn, S. W. 1984. Spreading the words: groundings in the
philosophy of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1872.
The expression of emotions in man and animals. London: Murray. Grandy, R. E.
and R. O. Warner 1986. Philosophical grounds of rationality: intentions,
categories, ends. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grice, H. P. 1948. Meaning, The
Oxford Philosophical Society. Repr. in Grice 1989. Grice, H. P. 1961. The
causal theory of perception, The Aristotelian Society. Repr. in Grice 1989.
Grice, H. P. 1967. Logic and Conversation, The William James lectures. Repr. in
a revised 1987 form in Grice 1989. Grice, H. P. 1969. Vacuous Names, in
Davidson and Hintikka, Words and objections. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. Grice, H.
P. 1971. Intention and uncertainty, The British Academy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. Grice, H. P. 1975. How pirots karulise elatically: some
simpler ways, The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley. Grice, H. P. 1982. Meaning Revisited, in N.
V. Smith, Mutual knowledge. London: Croom Helm, repr. in Grice 1989. Grice,
H.P. 1987. Retrospective epilogue, in Studies in the Way of Words. Grice, H. P.
1989. Studies in the way of words. London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press. Hart, H. L. A. and S. N. Hampshire 1958. Intention, decision,
and certainty, Mind, 67:1-12.Kemmerling, A. M. 1986. Utterer’s meaning
revisited, in Grandy/Warner 1986. Kneale, W. C. and M. Kneale. 1966. The
development of logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Pecocke, C. A. B. 1989. Transcendental Arguments in the Theory of Content: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered
Before the University of Oxford on 16 May 1989. Oxford University Press.
Prichard, H. A. 1968. Moral Obligation and Duty and Interest. Essays and
Lectures, edited by
W. D. Ross and J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Oxford University. Stevenson,
C. L. 1944. Ethics and language. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Strawson, P. F. 1964 Intention and convention in speech acts, The Philosophical
Review, repr. in Logico-Linguistic Papers, London, Methuen, 1971, pp. 149-169 as Blackburn puts
it in his discussion of Grice in the intention-based chapter of his “Spreading
the word: groundings in the philosophy of language.” Intentio seconda or
obliqua bears heavily on Grice’s presentation for the Oxford Philosophical Society.
The motivation behind Grice’s analysis pertains to philosophical methodology.
Grice is legitimizing an ascription of ‘mean’ to a rational agent, such as … a
philosopher. This very ascription Grice finds to be ‘seemingly denied by
Wittgenstein’ (Grice 1986). As an exponent of what he would later and in jest
dub “The Post-War Oxonian School of ‘Ordinary-Language’ Philosophy,” Grice
engages in a bit of language botany, and dealing with the intricacies of
‘communicative’ uses of “mean.” Interestingly, and publicly – although a
provision is in order here – Grice acknowledges emotivist Stevenson, who
apparently taught Grice about ‘metabolic’ uses of “mean.” Stevenson, who read
English as a minor at Yale, would not venture to apply ‘mean’ to moans!
Realising it as a colloquial extension, he is allowed to use ‘mean,’ but in
scare quotes only! (“Smith’s reduced temperature ‘means’ that he is is
convalescent.” “There is a sense, to be sure, in
which a groan “means“ something, just a reduced temperature may at times ”mean”
convalescence.” Stevenson 1944:38). Close enough but no cigar. Stevenson
has ‘groan,’ which at least rhymes with ‘moan.’ (As for the proviso, Grice
never ‘meant’ to ‘publish’ his talk on ‘Meaning,’ but one of his tutees
submitted for publication, and on acceptance, Grice allowed the publication).
In “Meaning” Grice does not provide a conceptual analysis for, ‘by moaning, U
means [simpliciter] that p.’ He will in his “Meaning Revisited” – the
metabolical scare quotes are justified on two counts: ‘By moaning U means that
p’ is legitimized on the basis of the generic ‘x ‘means’ y iff x is a
consequence of y.’ But it is also justified on the basis that there is a
continuum between U’s involuntarily moaning thereby meaning that he is in pain,
and U’s voluntarily moaning, thereby ‘communicating’ that he is in pain.
However, and more importantly for our exploration of the ‘intentum,’ Grice
hastens to add that he does not agree with Stevenson’s purely ‘causal’ account.
The main reason is not ‘anti-naturalistic.’ It is just that Grice sees
Stevenson’s proposal as as involving a vicious circle. Typically, Grice
extrapolates the relevant quote from Stevenson, slightly out of context. Grice
refers to Stevenson’s appeal to "an elaborate process of conditioning attending
… communication."Grice: “If we have to take seriously the second part of
the qualifying phrase ("attending … communication"), Stevenson’s
account of meaning is obviously circular. We might just as well say, "U
means” if “U communicates,” which, though true, is not helpful. It MIGHT be
helpful for Cicero translating from Grecian to Roman: ‘com-municatio’ indeed
translates a Grecian turn of phrase involving ‘what is common.’ f. “con-” and
root “mu-,” to bind; cf.: immunis, munus, moenia.’And the suggestion would be
helpful if we say that to ‘communicate,’ or ‘mean,’ is just to bring some
intentum to be allotted ‘common ground,’ because of the psi-transmission it is
shared between the emissor and his intended addressee. This one hopes is both
true AND ‘helpful.’ In any case, Grice’s tutee Strawson later
found Grice’s elucidation of utterer’s meaning to be ‘objection-proof’
(Starwson and Wiggins, 2001) in terms of a set of necessary and sufficient
conditions, of an utterer or emissor E meaning that p, by uttering ‘x,’ and
appealing to primary and secondary intentionality. But is Grice’s
intentionalism a sort of behaviourism? Grice denies that in “Method” calling
‘behaviourism’ ‘silly. Grice further explores intentio obliqua as it pertains
to his remarks towards a general theory of “re-presentation.” The place where
this excursus takes place is crucial. It is his Valediction to his compilation
of essays, Studies in the Way of Words, posthumously published. At this stage,
he must have felt that, what he once regarded krypto-technic in Peirce, is no
more! Grice has already identified in that ‘Valediction’ many strands of his
philosophical thought, and concludes his re-assessment of his ‘philosophy of
language’ and semiotics with an attempt to provide some general remarks about
‘to represent’ in general, perhaps to counter the allegations of vicious
circularity which his approach had received, seeing that “p” features, as a
‘gap-sign,’ as the content of both an ‘expression’ and a ‘psychological’
attitude. In trying to reconcile his austere views on “Meaning,” back in that
evening at the Oxford Philosophical Society, where he distinguished two senses
of ‘mean’ (“Smoke ‘means’ fire,” and ““Smoke” means ‘smoke’”). By focusing on
the most general of verbs for a psychological state or attitude, ‘to
represent,’ that even allows for a non-psychological reading, Grice wants to be
seen as answering the challenge of an alleged vicious circle with which his
intention-based approach is usually associated. The secondary-intentional
non-iconic mode of representation rests on a prior iconic mode and can be
understood as ‘pre-conventional,’ without any explicit recourse to the features
we associate with a developed system of communication. Grice needs no ‘language
of thought’ or sermo mentalis alla Ockham there. Grice allows that one can
communicate fully without the need to use what more conventional philosophers
call ‘a language.’ Artists do it all the time!
The passage from intentio prima to full intentio seconda is, for Grice,
gradual and complex. Grice means to adhere with ‘ordinary’ discourse, in its implicatura
and dis-implicaata. The passage also adhering to a functionalist approach qua
‘method in philosophical psychology,’ as he’d prefer, that needs not to
postulate a full-blown ‘linguistic entity’ as the object of intentional
thought. In this respect, it is worth mentioning the work of C. A. B. Peacocke,
who knew Grice from his Oxford days and later joined his seminars at Berkeley,
and who has developed this line of thought in a better fashion than less
careful philosophers. Grice’s programme has occasionally, and justly, been
compared with phenomenological approaches to expression and communication, such
as Marty’s. It is hoped that the previous notes have shed some light on those
aspects where this interface can further be elaborated. Even as we leave an
intentio seconda to resume the discussion for a longer day. In his explorations
on the embedding of intensional concepts, Grice should be inspirational to
philosophers in more than one way, but especially in the one that he favoured
most: the problematicity of it all. As he put it in another context, when
defending absolute value. “Such a defence of absolute value is
of course, bristling with unsolved or incompletely solved problems. I do not
find this thought daunting. If philosophy generated no new problems it would be
dead, because it would be finished; and if it recurrently regenerated the same
old problems it would not be alive because it could never begin. So those who still
look to philosophy for their bread-and-butter should pray that the supply of
new problems never dries up.” (Grice 1991). In the Graeco-Roman tradition,
philosophers started to use ‘intentio prima,’ ‘intentio secunda,’ ‘intentio
tertia,’ and “… ad infinitum,” as they would put it. In post-war Oxford,
English philosopher H. P. Grice felt the need. The formalist he was, he found
subscribing numbers to embedded intentions has a strong appeal for him. Grice’s
main motivation is in the philosophy of language, but as ancillary towards
solving this or that problem concerning the ‘linguistic’ methodology of his
day. To appreciate Grice’s contribution one need to abstract a little from his
own historical circumstances, or rather, place them in the proper context, and
connect it with the general history of philosophy. As a matter of
history, ‘intentio prima,’ or ‘recta,’ as opposed to ‘obliqua,’ is part of
Nicolai Hartmann’s ‘mediaeval revival,’ as a reaction to mediaevalism having
made scorn by the likes of Rabelais that amused D. P. Henry. For the mediaeval
philosopher, to use Grice’s symbolism, was concerned with whether a chimaera
could eat ‘I2,’ a second intention. The mediaeval philosopher’s implicaturum
seems to be that a chimaera can easily eat ‘I1.’ Such a ‘quaestio
subtilissima,’ Rabelais jokes. If ‘I1,’ or, better, for
simplificatory purposes, ‘IR’ is a specific state, stance, or
attitude of the ‘soul,’ ‘ψ1’ or ‘ψR’ directed towards
its ‘de re’ ‘intentum,’ or ‘prae-sentatum,’ of the noumenon, ‘IO,’
‘intentio obliqua,’ is a state, stance, or attitude of the ‘soul,’ of the same
genus, ‘ψ2,’ or ‘ψS’ directed towards ‘ψR,’
its ‘de sensu’ ‘intentum’ now ‘re-prae-sentatum’ of the phainomenon or
ob-jectum (Abelard translates Aristotle’s ‘per divisionem’ as ‘de re’ and ‘per
compositionem’ and ‘per conjunctionem’ by ‘de sensu,’ and ‘per Soph. Elen.,
Kneale and Kneale, 1966). Grice’s intentionalism has been widely discussed, but
the defense he himself makes of intensionalism (versus extensionalism) has
proved inspiring, as when he assumes as an attending commentary to his
reductive analysis of the state of affairs by which the emissor communicates
that p, that he is putting forward “the legitimacy of [the] application of
[existential generalization] to a statement the expression of which contains
such [an] "intensional" verb[…] as "intend" (Grice 1989:
116 ). The expression ‘de sensu’ is due to Abelard, but Russell likes it. While
serving as Prince Regent of England in 1815, George IV casually remarks his
wish to meet ‘the author of Waverley’ in the flesh. The Prince was being funny,
you see. The prince would not know this, but when his press becomes embroiled
in pecuniary difficulties, Scotts set out to write a cash-cow. The result is
Waverley, a novel which did not name its author. It is a tale of the last
Jacobite rebellion in England, the “Forty-Five.” The novel meets with
considerable success. The next year, Scott. There follows a sequel, the same
general vein. Mindful of his reputation,
Scotts maintains the anonymous habit he displays with Waverley, and publishes
the sequel under “the Author of Waverley.” The identity “Author of Waverley” =
“Scott” is widely rumoured, and Scott is
given the honour of dining with George, Prince Regent, who had wished to
meet “Author of Waverley” in the flesh for a ‘snug little dinner’ at Carleton,
on hearing ‘the author of Waverley’ was in town. The use of a descriptor may
lead to the implicaturum that His Majesty is p’rhaps not sure that ‘the author
of Waverley’ has a name, and isR Scott. Lack of certainty is one
thing, yet, to quote from Russell, “an interest in the law of identity can
hardly be attributed to the first gentleman of Europe.” Grice admired Russell
profusely and one of his essays is wittily entitled, “Definite descriptions in
Russell and in the Vernacular,” so his explorations of ‘intentio’ ‘de sensu’
have an intrinsic interest. Keywords: H.
Paul Grice, intentio seconda, implicaturum, intentionalism, intentum, intentum de sensu, ‘that’-clause, the
recte-oblique distinction. Grice explored issues of intentum de sensu in
various areas. First, ‘meaning.’ Second, ‘knowing.’ Third, ‘wanting.’ Fourth,
‘intending,’ Fifth, pirots, with incorrigibility and privileged access. Sixth,
morality and the regressus. Seventh, the continuum and the unity. With Grice, it all
starts, roughly, when Grice comes up with a topic for a talk at The Oxford
Philosophical Society.The Society is holding one of those meetings, and Grice
thinks of presenting a few conclusions he had reached at his seminars on C. S.
Peirce.What’s the good of an Oxford don of keeping tidy lecture notes if you
will not be able to lecture to a philosophical addressee? Peirce is the philosopher
on whom Grice choses to lecture. In part, for “not being particularly popular
on these shores,” and in part because Grice noted the ‘heretic’ in Peirce with
which he could identify.Granted, at this stage, Grice disliked the
un-Englishness of some of Peirce’s over-Latinate jargon, what Grice finds the
‘krypto-technic.’ ‘Sign,’ ‘symbol,’ ‘icon,’ and the rest of them!Instead, Grice
thinks, initially for the sake of his tutees and students – he was university
lecturer -- sticking with the simpler, ‘ordinary’, short English lexeme
‘mean.’A. M. Kemmerling, of all people, who wrote the obituary for Grice for
Synthese, has precisely cast doubts on the ‘universal’ validity of Grice’s
proposed conceptual reductive analysis, notably in his Ph.D dissertation on ‘Meinen.’ Note the irony in Kemmerling’s title: Was Grice mit "Meinen" meint - Eine Rekonstruktion der Griceschen
Analyse rationaler Kommunikation.”
Nothing jocular in the subtitle, for this indeed is a reconstruction of
‘rational’ communication. The funny bit is in “Was mit “Meinen” Grice meint”!
In that very phrase, which is rhetorical, and allows for an answer, because
‘meinen’ is both mentioned and used, Kemmerling allows that he is ‘buying’
Grice’s idea that his reductive analysis of ‘mean’ applies to German ‘meinen.’
Kemmerling is also pointing to the ‘primacy’ (to use Suppes’s phrase) of
‘utterer’s’ or ‘emissor’s “communicatum” or ‘Meinung.” Kemmerling advertises
his interest in exploring on what _Grice_ means – by uttering ‘meinen,’ almost!
As Kemmerling notes, German ‘meinen,’ cognate via common Germanic with
English ‘mean,’ (cf. Frisian ‘mein,’ – and Hazzlitt, “Bread, butter, and green
cheese, very good English, very good cheese”) is none other than ‘mean’ that
Grice means. And ‘Grice means’ is the only literal, i. e. non-metabolic use of
the verb Grice allows – as applied to a rational agent, which features in the
subtitle to Kemmerling’s dissertation. Thus one reads in Kluge, “Etymologische
Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 1881, of “meinen,”
rendered by J. F. Davis as ‘to think, opine, mean,’ from a MHG used to indicate, in Davis’s rendition,
‘to direct one's thoughts to, have in view, aim at, be affected towards a
person, love,’ OHG meinen, meinan, ‘to mean, think, say,
declare.’ = OS mênian,
Du. meenen, OE mœ̂nan, E mean (to this Anglo-Saxon mœ̂nan, cf. prob. moan – I know your meaning from your moaning),
all from WGmc. meinen, mainjan, ‘mênjan,’ and cognate with ‘man,’ ‘to think’ (cf. ‘mahnen,’ ‘Mann,’ and ‘Minne’). Kemmerling
is very apropos, because Grice engaged in philosophical discussion with him, as
testified by his perceptive contribution to P. G. R. I. C. E. (Kemmerling,
1986). On top, in his presentation for the Oxford Philosophical Society, Grice
wants to restrict the philosophical interest to ‘de sensu,’ the ‘that’-clause
(cf. the recte-oblique distinction), viz. not just ‘what Grice means,’ if this
is going to be expaned as ‘something wonderful.’ Not enough for Grice. It has
to be expanded, for the thing to have philosophical interest into a
‘propositional clause,’, an ‘intensional’ context, i. e., ‘Grice means that…’
Grice cavalierly dismisses other use of ‘mean,’ – notably the ubiquitous, ‘mean
to…’ – He will later explain his reason for this. It was after William James
provoked Prichard. For William James uttered: “I will that the distant table
slides on the floor toward me. It doesn’t’. Prichard turns this into the
conceptual priority of ‘will that…’ for which Grice gives him the credit he deserved
at a later lecture now on his being appointed a Fellow of The British Academy
(Grice, 1971). Strictly, what Grice does
in the Oxford Philosophical Socieety presentation is to distinguish between
various ‘mean’ and end up focusing on ‘mean’ as followed by a ‘that’-clause. In
the typical Oxonian fashion, that Grice borrows (but never returns) from J. C.
Wilson, Grice has the IO as ‘meaning that so-and-so’ (Grice, 1989:
217). Grice explicitly displays the primacy of a reductive analysis of the
conceptual circumstances involving an emissor (Anglo-Saxon ‘utterer’) who
‘means’ that p. It will be a longer ‘shaggy-dog’ story Grice tells when he
crosses the divide from ‘propositional’ (p) to ‘predicative’ ascriptions (“By
uttering ‘Fido is shaggy,’ Grice means that the dog is hairy-coated (Grice
1989). Grice notes that ‘metabolically,’ “mean,” at least in English, can be
applied to various other things, sometimes even involving a ‘that’-clause. “By
delivering his budget, the major means that we will have a hard year.’ Grice
finds that ‘but we won’t’ turns him into a self-contradicter. In Grice’s usage,
‘x ‘means’ y’ iff ‘y is a consequence [consequentia] of x’ --. Quite a
departure from Old Frisian. If Hume’s objection to the use of the verb ‘cause,’
is that it covers animistic beliefs (“Charles I’s decapitation willed his
death”), English allows for disimplicated or loose ‘metabolic’ uses of ‘will’
(“It ‘will’ rain”) and ‘mean’ (Grice’s moaning means that he is in pain).
desideratum: Qua volition,
a mental event involved with the initiation of action. ‘To will’ is sometimes
taken to be the corresponding verb form of ‘volition’. The concept of volition
is rooted in modern philosophy; contemporary philosophers have transformed it
by identifying volitions with ordinary mental events, such as intentions, or
beliefs plus desires. Volitions, especially in contemporary guises, are often
taken to be complex mental events consisting of cognitive, affective, and
conative elements. The conative element is the impetus – the underlying
motivation – for the action. A velleity is a conative element insufficient by
itself to initiate action. The will is a faculty, or set of abilities, that
yields the mental events involved in initiating action. There are three primary
theories about the role of volitions in action. The first is a reductive
account in which action is identified with the entire causal sequence of the
mental event (the volition) causing the bodily behavior. J. S. Mill, for
example, says: “Now what is action? Not one thing, but a series of two things:
the state of mind called a volition, followed by an effect. . . . [T]he two
together constitute the action” (Logic). Mary’s raising her arm is Mary’s
mental state causing her arm to rise. Neither Mary’s volitional state nor her
arm’s rising are themselves actions; rather, the entire causal sequence (the
“causing”) is the action. The primary difficulty for this account is
maintaining its reductive status. There is no way to delineate volition and the
resultant bodily behavior without referring to action. There are two
non-reductive accounts, one that identifies the action with the initiating
volition and another that identifies the action with the effect of the
volition. In the former, a volition is the action, and bodily movements are
mere causal consequences. Berkeley advocates this view: “The Mind . . . is to
be accounted active in . . . so far forth as volition is included. . . . In
plucking this flower I am active, because I do it by the motion of my hand,
which was consequent upon my volition” (Three Dialogues). In this century,
Prichard is associated with this theory: “to act is really to will something”
(Moral Obligation, 1949), where willing is sui generis (though at other places
Prichard equates willing with the action of mentally setting oneself to do
something). In this sense, a volition is an act of will. This account has come
under attack by Ryle (Concept of Mind, 1949). Ryle argues that it leads to a
vicious regress, in that to will to do something, one must will to will to do
it, and so on. It has been countered that the regress collapses; there is
nothing beyond willing that one must do in order to will. Another criticism of
Ryle’s, which is more telling, is that ‘volition’ is an obscurantic term of
art; “[volition] is an artificial concept. We have to study certain specialist
theories in order to find out how it is to be manipulated. . . . [It is like]
‘phlogiston’ and ‘animal spirits’ . . . [which] have now no utility” (Concept
of Mind). Another approach, the causal theory of action, identifies an action
with the causal consequences of volition. Locke, e.g., says: “Volition or
willing is an act of the mind directing its thought to the production of any
action, and thereby exerting its power to produce it. . . . [V]olition is
nothing but that particular determination of the mind, whereby . . . the mind
endeavors to give rise, continuation, or stop, to any action which it takes to
be in its power” (Essay concerning Human Understanding). This is a functional
account, since an event is an action in virtue of its causal role. Mary’s arm
rising is Mary’s action of raising her arm in virtue of being caused by her
willing to raise it. If her arm’s rising had been caused by a nervous twitch,
it would not be action, even if the bodily movements were photographically the
same. In response to Ryle’s charge of obscurantism, contemporary causal
theorists tend to identify volitions with ordinary mental events. For example,
Davidson takes the cause of actions to be beliefs plus desires and Wilfrid
Sellars takes volitions to be intentions to do something here and now. Despite
its plausibility, however, the causal theory faces two difficult problems: the
first is purported counterexamples based on wayward causal chains connecting
the antecedent mental event and the bodily movements; the second is provision
of an enlightening account of these mental events, e.g. intending, that does
justice to the conative element. See also ACTION THEORY, FREE WILL PROBLEM, PRACTICAL
REASONING, WAYWARD CAUSAL CHAIN. M.B. volition volition. Grice makes a double use of this. It should be thus two
entries. There’s the conversational desideratum, where a desideratum is like a
maxim or an imperative – and then there are two specific desiderata: the
desideratum of conversational clarity, and the desideratum of conversational
candour. Grice was never sure what adjective to use for the ‘desiderative.’ He
liked buletic. He liked desideratum because it has the co-relate
‘consideratum,’ for belief. He uses
‘deriderative’ and a few more! Of course what he means is a sub-psychological
modality, or rather a ‘soul.’ So he would apply it ‘primarily’ to the soul, as
Plato and Aristotle does. The ‘psyche’, or ‘anima’ is what is ‘desiderativa.’
The Grecians are pretty confused about this (but ‘boulemaic’ and ‘buletic’ are
used), and the Romans didn’t help. Grice is concerned with a
rational-desiderative, that takes a “that”-clause (or oratio obliqua), and qua
constructivist, he is also concerned with a pre-rational desiderative (he has
an essay on “Needs and Wants,” and his detailed example in “Method” is a
squarrel (sic) who needs a nut. On top, while Grice suggest s that it goes both
ways: the doxastic can be given a reductive analaysis in terms of the buletic,
and the buletic in terms of the doxastic, he only cares to provide the former.
Basically, an agent judges that p, if his willing that p correlates to a state
of affairs that satisfies his desires. Since he does not provide a reductive
analysis for Prichard’s willing-that, one is left wondering. Grice’s position
is that ‘willing that…’ attains its ‘sense’ via the specification, as a
theoretical concept, in some law in the folk-science that agents use to explain
their behaviour. Grice gets subtler when he deals with mode-markers for the
desiderative: for these are either utterer-oriented, or addressee-oriented, and
they may involve a buletic attitude itself, or a doxastic attitude. When
utterer-addressed, utterer wills that utterer wills that p. There is no closure
here, and indeed, a regressus ad infinitum is what Grice wants, since this
regressus allows him to get univeersabilisability, in terms of conceptual,
formal, and applicational kinds of generality. In this he is being Kantian, and
Hareian. While Grice praises Kantotle, Aristotle here would stay unashamedly
‘teleological,’ and giving priority to a will that may not be universalisable,
since it’s the communitarian ‘good’ that matters. what does Grice have to say
about our conversational practice? L and S have “πρᾶξις,” from “πράσσω,” and
which they render as ‘moral action,’ oποίησις, τέχνη;” “oποιότης,” “ἤθη καὶ
πάθη καὶ π.,” “oοἱ πολιτικοὶ λόγοι;” “ἔργῳ καὶ πράξεσιν, οὐχὶ λόγοις” Id.6.3;
ἐν ταῖς πράξεσι ὄντα τε καὶ πραττόμενα, “exhibited in actual life,” action in
drama, “oλόγος; “μία π. ὅλη καὶ τελεία.” With practical Grice means buletic.
Praxis involves acting, and surely Grice presupposes acting. By uttering, i. e.
by the act of uttering, expression x, U m-intends that p. Grice occasionally
refers to action and behaviour as the thing which an ascription of a
psychological state explains. Grice prefers the idiom of soul. Theres the
ratiocinative soul. Within the ratiocinative, theres the executive soul and the
merely administrative soul. Cicero had to translate Aristotle into prudentia,
every time Aristotle talked of phronesis. Grice was aware that the
terminology by Kant can be confusing. Kant used ‘pure’ reason for reason in the
doxastic realm. The critique by Kant of practical reason is hardly
symmetrical to his critique of doxastic reason. Grice, with his
æqui-vocality thesis of must (must crosses the buletic-boulomaic/doxastic
divide), Grice is being more of a symmetricalist. The buletic, boulomaic, or
volitive, is a part of the soul, as is the doxatic or judicative. And
judicative is a trick because there is such a thing as a value judgement, or an
evaluative judgement, which is hardly doxastic. Grice plays with two
co-relative operators: desirability versus probability. Grice invokes the exhibitive/protreptic
distinction he had introduced in the fifth James lecture, now applied to
psychological attitudes themselves. This Grice’s attempt is to tackle the
Kantian problem in the Grundlegung: how to derive the categorical imperative
from a counsel of prudence. Under the assumption that the protasis is Let the
agent be happy, Grice does not find it obtuse at all to construct a
universalisable imperative out of a mere motive-based counsel of prudence.
Grice has an earlier paper on pleasure which relates. The derivation involves
seven steps. Grice proposes seven steps in the derivation. 1. It is a
fundamental law of psychology that, ceteris paribus, for any creature R, for
any P and Q, if R wills P Λ judges if P, P as a result of Q, R wills
Q. 2. Place this law within the scope of a "willing" operator: R
wills for any P Λ Q, if R wills P Λ judges that if P, P as
a result of Q, R wills Q. 3. wills turns to should. If rational, R will have to
block unsatisfactory (literally) attitudes. R should (qua rational) judge for
any P Λ Q, if it is satisfactory to will that P Λ it is
satisfactory to judge that if P, P as a result of Q, it is sastisfactory to
will that Q. 4. Marking the mode: R should (qua rational) judge for any
P Λ Q, if it is satisfactory that !P Λ that if it .P, .P
only as a result of Q, it is satisfactory that !Q. 5. via (p & q
-> r) -> (p -> (q -> r)): R should (qua rational)
judge for any P Λ Q, if it is satisfactory that if .P, .P only
because Q, i is satisfactory that, if let it be that P, let it be that Q. 6. R
should (qua rational) judge for any P Λ Q, if P, P only because p
yields if let it be that P, let it be that Q. 7. For any P Λ Q if P,
P only because Q yields if let it be that P, let it be that Q. Grice was
well aware that a philosopher, at Oxford, needs to be a philosophical
psychologist. So, wanting and needing have to be related to willing. A plant
needs water. A floor needs sweeping. So need is too broad. So is want, a
non-Anglo-Saxon root for God knows what. With willing things get closer to the
rational soul. There is willing in the animal soul. But when it comes to
rational willing, there must be, to echo Pritchard, a conjecture, some doxastic
element. You cannot will to fly, or will that the distant chair slides over the
floor toward you. So not all wants and needs are rational willings, but then
nobody said they would. Grice is interested in emotion in his power structure
of the soul. A need and a want may count as an emotion. Grice was never too
interested in needing and wanting because they do not take a that-clause. He
congratulates Urmson for having introduced him to the brilliant willing that …
by Prichard. Why is it, Grice wonders, that many ascriptions of buletic states
take to-clause, rather than a that-clause? Even mean, as ‘intend.’ In this
Grice is quite different from Austin, who avoids the that-clause. The
explanation by Austin is very obscure, like those of all grammars on the
that’-clause, the ‘that’ of ‘oratio obliqua’ is not in every way similar to the
‘that’-clause in an explicit performative formula. Here the utterer is not
reporting his own ‘oratio’ in the first person singular present indicative
active. Incidentally, of course, it is not in the least necessary that an
explicit performative verb should be followed by a ‘that’-clause. In important
classes of cases it is followed by ‘to . . .,’ or by or nothing, e. g. ‘I
apologize for…,’ ‘I salute you.’ Now many of these verbs appear to be quite
satisfactory pure performatives. Irritating though it is to have them as such,
linked with clauses that look like statements, true or false, e. g., when I say
‘I prophesy that …,’ ‘I concede that …’,
‘I postulate that …,’ the clause following normally looks just like a
statement, but the verb itself seems to be pure performatives. One
may distinguish the performative opening part, ‘I state that …,’ which makes
clear how the utterance is to be taken, that it is a statement, as distinct
from a prediction, etc.), from the bit in the that-clause which is required to
be true or false. However, there are many cases which, as language stands at
present, we are not able to split into two parts in this way, even though the
utterance seems to have a sort of explicit performative in it. Thus, ‘I liken x
to y,’ or ‘I analyse x as y.’ Here we both do the likening and assert that
there is a likeness by means of one compendious phrase of at least a
quasi-performative character. Just to spur us on our way, we may also mention
‘I know that …’, ‘I believe that …’, etc. How complicated are these examples?
We cannot assume that they are purely descriptive, which has Grice talking of
the pseudo-descriptive. Want etymologically means absence; need should be
preferred. The squarrel (squirrel) Toby needs intake of nuts, and youll soon
see gobbling them! There is not much philosophical bibliography on these two
psychological states Grice is analysing. Their logic is interesting. Smith
wants to play cricket. Smith needs to play cricket. Grice is
concerned with the propositional content attached to the want and need
predicate. Wants that sounds harsh; so does need that. Still, there
are propositional attached to the pair above. Smith plays cricket. Grice
took a very cavalier attitude to what linguists spend their lives
analysing. He thought it was surely not the job of the philosopher,
especially from a prestigious university such as Oxford, to deal with the
arbitrariness of grammatical knots attached to this or that English verb. He
rarely used English, but stuck with ordinary language. Surely, he saw
himself in the tradition of Kantotle, and so, aiming at grand philosophical
truths: not conventions of usage, even his own! 1. Squarrel Toby has a
nut, N, in front of him. 2. Toby is short on squarrel food (observed or assumed),
so, 3. Toby wills squarrel food (by postulate of Folk Pyschological
Theory θ connecting willing with intake of N). 4. Toby prehends a nut
as in front (from (1) by Postulate of Folk Psychological Theory θ, if it
is assumed that nut and in front are familiar to Toby). 5. Toby joins squarrel
food with gobbling, nut, and in front (i.e. Toby judges gobbling, on nut in
front, for squarrel food (by Postulate of Folk Psychological
Theory θ with the aid of prior observation. So, from 3, 4 and 5, 6.
Tobby gobbles; and since a nut is in front of him, gobbles the nut in front of
him. The system of values of the society to which the agent belongs forms the
external standard for judging the relative importance of the commitments by the
agent. There are three dimensions of value: universally human, cultural that
vary with societies and times; and personal that vary with individuals. Each
dimension has a standard for judging the adequacy of the relevant values. Human
values are adequate if they satisfy basic needs; cultural values are adequate
if they provide a system of values that sustains the allegiance of the
inhabitants of a society; and personal values are adequate if the conceptions
of well‐being formed out of them enable individuals to live
satisfying lives. These values conflict and our well‐being requires some way of settling their conflicts, but
there is no universal principle for settling the conflicts; it can only be done
by attending to the concrete features of particular conflicts. These features
vary with circumstances and values. Grice reads Porter.The idea of the value
chain is based on the process view of organizations, the idea of seeing a
manufacturing (or service) organization as a system, made up of subsystems each
with inputs, transformation processes and outputs. Inputs, transformation
processes, and outputs involve the acquisition and consumption of resources –
money, labour, materials, equipment, buildings, land, administration and
management. How value chain activities are carried out determines costs and affects
profits.In his choice of value system and value sub-system, Grice is defending
objectivity, since it is usually the axiological relativist who uses such a
pretentious phrasing! More than a value may co-ordinate in a system. One such
is eudæmonia (cf. system of ends). The problem for Kant is the reduction of the
categorical imperative to the hypothetical or
suppositional imperative. For Kant, a value tends towards the
Subjectsive. Grice, rather, wants to offer a metaphysical defence of objective
value. Grice called the manual of conversational maxims the Conversational
Immanuel. The keyword to search the H. P. Grice is ‘will,’ and ‘volitional,’
even ‘ill-will,’ (“Metaphysics and ill-will,” s. V, c. 7-f. 28) and
‘benevolence’ (vide below under ‘conversational benevolence”). Also
‘desirability’: “Modality, desirability, and probability,” s. V, c. 8-ff.
14-15, and the conference lecture in a different series, “Probability,
desirability, and mood operators,” s. II, c. 2-f.11). Grice makes systematic use of ‘practical’ to
contrast with the ‘alethic,’ too (“Practical reason,” s. V, c. 9-f.1), The H.
P. Grice Papers, BANC.
desideratum of conversational
candour: The key for philosophical
attention here is ‘candour’ but the collocation is delightfully Griceian, “the
desideratum of conversational candour”
where only ‘candour,’ and just about, should be taken seriously. The term
‘desideratum’ has to be taken seriously. It involves freedom. This includes the
maximin. It should be noted that candour is DESIRABLE. There is a desirability
for candour. Candour is not a given. Ditto for clarity. See conversational
desideratum, simpliciter. A rational desideratum is a desideratum by a rational
agent and which he expects from another rational agent. One should make the
strongest move, and on the other hand try not to mislead.Grice's Oxford
"Conversation" Lectures, 1966Grice: Between Self-Love and Benevolence
As I was saying (somewhere), Grice uses "self-love", charmingly
qualified with capitals, as
"Conversational Self-Love", and, less charmingly, "Conversational Benevolence", in
lectures advertised at Oxford, as "Logic and Conversation" that he gave at Oxford in
1964 as "University Lecturer in
Philosophy". He also gave seminars on "Conversational
helpfulness." A number of the lectures by Grice include discussion of
thetypes of behaviour people in general exhibit, and thereforethe types of
expectations[cfr. owings]they might bring to a venture such as a
conversation.Grice suggests that people in general both exhibitand EXPECT a
certain degree of helpfulness [-- alla Rosenschein, epistemic/boulemaic:If A
cognizes that B wills p, then A wills p.]
"from OTHERS" [-- reciprocal vs. reflexive, etc.] usually on
the understanding that such helpfulness does NOT get in the way of particular
goals and does not involve undue effort cf. least effort? - cfr. Hobbes on self-love.
It two people, even complete strangers,are going through a gate, the
expectation isthat the FIRST ONE through will hold thegate open, or at least
leave it open, for thesecond. The expectation is such that todo OTHERWISE
without particular reasonwould be interpreted as RUDE. The type of helpfulness
exhibited andexpected in conversation is more specificbecause of a particular,
although not a unique feature of conversation.It is a COLLABORATIVE venture
betweenthe participants.There is a SHARED aimGrice wonders. His words, Does "helpfulness in something WE ARE
DOING TOGETHER” equate to 'cooperation'?He seems to have decided that it
does. By the later lectures in the series, 'the principle of conversational
helpfulness'has been rebranded the expectation of 'cooperation.' During the
Oxford lectures, Grice develops his account of the precise nature of this
cooperation. It can be seen as governed by certain regularities, or principles,
detailing expected behaviour. The expression'maxim' to describe these
regularities appears relatively late in the lectures.Grice's INITIAL choices of
terms are 'objectives' and 'desiderata'.He was particularly fond of the latter.
He was interested in detailing the desirable forms of behaviour for the purpose
of achieving a joint goal of the conversation. Initially, Grice posits TWO such
desiderata. Those relating to candour on the one hand and clarity on the other.
The desideratum of candour contains his general PRINCIPLE of making the
strongest (MAX) possible statement and, as a LIMITING (MAX) factor on this, the
suggestion that speakers should try not to mislead. (Do not mislead). cfr.
our"We are brothers"-- but not mutual."We are married to each
other". "You _are_ a boor".----The desideratum of conversational
clarity concerns the manner of expression. [His later reference to Modus or Mode
as used by Kant as one of the four
categories] for any conversational contribution. It includes the IMPORTANT
expectations of relevance to understanding and also insists that the main
import of an utterance be clear and explicit. (“Explicate!”) These two factors
are constantly to be WEIGHED against two
FUNDAMENTAL and SOMETIMES COMPETING DEMANDS. Contributions to a conversation
are aimed towards the agreed current purposes by the PRINCIPLE of Conversational
Benevolence. The principle of CONVERSATIONAL SELF-LOVE ensures the assumption
on the part of both participants that neither will go to unnecessary trouble
[LEAST EFFORT] in framing their contribution. This has been a topic of interest
to Noh end. In "Conversational Immanuel" Grice tries different ways
of making sense -- it is very easy to do so -- of Grice's distinctions that go
over the head of some linguists I know! Reasonable versus rational for example.
A Rawlsian distinction of sorts. Rational is too weak. We need 'reasonable'.
So, what sort of reasonableness is that which results from this harmonious, we
hope, clash of self-love and benevolence? Grice tried, wittily, to extend the
purposes of conversation to involve MUTUALLY INFLUENCING EACH OTHER -- a
reciprocal. (WoW, ii). And there's a mythical reconstruction of this in his
"Meaning Revisited" which he contributed to this symposium organised
by N. Smith on Mutua knowledge. But issues remains, we hope. The concept of
‘candour’is especially basic for Grice since it is constitutive of what it
means to identify the ‘significatum.’ As he notes, ‘false’ information is no
information. This is serious, because it has to do with the acceptum. A
contribution which is not trustworthy is not deemed a contribution. It is
conceptually impossible to intend to PROVIDE information if you are aware that
you are not being trustworthy and not conveying it. As for the degree of
explicitness, as Grice puts it. Since in communication in a certain fashion all
must be public, if an idea or thesis is heavily obscured, it can no longer be
regarded as having been propounded. This gives acceptum justification to the
correlative desideratum of conversational clarity. On top, if there is a level
of obscurity, the thing is not deemed to have been a communicatum or
significatum. It is all about confidence, you know. U expects A will find him
confident. Thus we find in Short and Lewis, “confīdo,” wich they render as
“to trust confidently in something,” and also, “confide in, rely firmly upon,
to believe, be assured of,” as an enhancing of “sperare,” in Cicero’s Att. 6,
9, 1. Trust and rationality are pre-requisites of conversation. Urmson develops
this. They phrase in Urmson is "implied claim." Whenever U makes a
conversational contribution in a standard context, there is an implied claim to
U being trustworthy and reasonable. What do Grice and Urmson mean by an
"implied claim"? It is obvious enough, but they both love to expand.
Whenever U utters an expression which can be used to convey truth or falsehood
there is an implied claim to trustworthiness by U, unless the situation shows
that this is not so. U may be acting or reciting or incredulously echoing the
remark of another, or flouting the expectation. This, Grice and Urmson think,
may need an explanation. Suppose that U utters, in an ordinary
circumstance, ‘It will rain tomorrow,’ or ‘It rained yesterday,’ or ‘It is
raining.’ This act carries with it the claim that U should be trusted and
licenses A to believe that it will rain tomorrow. By this is meant that
just as it is understood that no U will give an order unless he is entitled to
give orders, so it is understood that no U will utter a sentence of a kind
which can be used to make a statement unless U is willing to claim that that
statement is true, and hence one would be acting in a misleading manner if one
uttered the sentence if he was not willing to make that claim. Here, the
predicate “implies that …,” Grice, Grant, Moore, Nowell-Smith, and Urmson
hasten to add, is being used in such a way that, if there is a an expectation
that a thing is done in Circumstance C, U implies that C holds if he does the
thing. The point is often made if not always in the terms Grice uses, and it
is, Urmson and Grice believe, in substance uncontroversial. Grice and Urmson
wish to make the point that, when an utterer U deploys a hedge with an
indicative sentence, there is not merely an implied claim that the whole
statement is true but also that is true. The implied or expressed claim by
the utterer to trustworthiness need not be very strong. The whole point of
a hedge is to modify or weaken (if not, as Grice would have it, flout) the
claim by U to full trustworthiness which would be implied by the unhedged
assertion. But even if U utters “He is, I suppose, at home;” or “I
guess that the penny will come down heads," U expresses, or for
Urmson plainly implies, with however little reason, that this is what U accepts
as worth the trust by A. Now Grice and Urmson meet an objection which is made
by some philosophers to this comparison. Grice and Urmson intend to meet the
objection by a fairly detailed examination of the example which they themselves
would most likely choose. In doing this Grice and Urmson further explain
the use of a parenthetical verb. The adverb is "probably" and
the verb is “I believe.” To say, that something is probable, the imaginary
objector will say, is to imply that it is reasonable to believe, that the
evidence justifies a guarded claim for the trust or trustworthiness of U and
the truth of the statement. But to say that someone else, a third person,
believes something does not imply that it is reasonable for U or A to believe
it, nor that the evidence justifies the guarded or implied claim to factivity
or truth which U makes. Therefore, the objector continues, the difference
between the use of “I believe” and “probably” is not, as Grice and Urmson
suggest, merely one of nuance and degree of impersonality. In one case,
“probably,” reasonableness is implied; in the other, “believe,” it is not. This
objection is met by Grice and Urmson. They do so by making a general
point. To use the rational-reasonable distinction in “Conversational implicaturum”
and “Aspects,” there is an implied claim by U to reasonableness. Further
to an implied claim to trust whenever a sentence is uttered in a standard
context, now Grice and Urmson add, to meet the sceptical objection about the
contrast between “probably” and “I believe” that, whenever U makes a statement
in a standard context there is an implied claim to reasonableness. This
contention must be explained alla Kant. Cf. Strawson on the presumption of
conversational relevance, and Austin, Moore, Nowell-Smith, Grant, and
Warnock. To use Hart’s defeasibility, and Hall’s excluder, unless U is
acting or story-telling, or preface his remarks with some such phrase
as “I know Im being silly, but …” or, “I admit it is
unreasonable, but …” it is, Grice and Urmson think, a presupposition or
expectation of communication or conversation that a communicator will not make
a statement, thereby implying this trust, unless he has some ground,
however tenuous, for the statement. To utter “The King is visiting Oxford
tomorrow,” or “The President of the BA has a corkscrew in his pocket,” and
then, when asked why the utterer is uttering that, to answer “Oh, for
no reason at all,” would be to sin, theologically, against the basic
conventions governing the use of discourse. Grice goes on to provide a Kantian
justification for that, hence his amusing talk of maxims and stuff.
Therefore, Urmson and Grice think there is an implied or expressed claim
to reasonableness which goes with all our statements, i.e. there is
a mutual expectation that a communicator will not make a statement unless he is
prepared to claim and defend its reasonablenesss. Cf. Grice’s desideratum of
conversational candour, subsumed under the over-arching principle of
conversational helpfulness (formerly conversational
benevolence-cum-self-love). Grice thinks that the principle of
conversational benevolence has to be weighed against the principle of
conversational self-love. The result is the overarching principle of
conversational helpfulness. Clarity gets in the picture. The desideratum of
conversational clarity is a reasonable requirement for conversants to abide
by. Grice follows some observations by Warnock. The logical grammar
of “trust,” “candour,” “charity,” “sincerity,” “decency,” “honesty,” is subtle,
especially when we are considering the two sub-goals of conversation: giving
and receiving information/influencing and being influenced by others. In both
sub-goals, trust is paramount. The explorations of trust has become an Oxonian
hobby, with authors not such like Warnock, but Williams, and
others. Grice’s essay is entitled, “Trust, metaphysics, value.” Trust as a
corollary of the principle of conversational helpfulness. In a given
conversational setting, assuming the principle of conversational helpfulness is
operating, U is assumed by A to be trustworthy and candid. There are two
modes of trust, which relate to the buletic sub-goal and the doxastic sub-goal
which Grice assumes the principle of conversational helpfulness captures:
giving and receiving information, and influencing and being influenced by
others. In both sub-goals, trust is key. In the doxastic realm, trust
has to do, not so much or only, with truth (with which the expression is
cognate), or satisfactoriness-value, but evidence and probability. In the
buletic realm, there are the dimensions of satisfactoriness-value (‘good’
versus ‘true’), and ‘ground’ versus evidence, which becomes less crucial. But
note that one is trustworthy regarding BOTH the buletic attitude and the
doxastic attitude. Grice mentions this or that buletic attitudes which is not
usually judged in terms of evidential support (“I vow to thee my country.”)
However, in the buletic realm, U is be assumed as trustworthy if U has the
buletic attitude he is expressing. The cheater, the insincere, the dishonest,
the untrustworthy, for Grice is not irrational, just repugnant. How immoral is
the idea that honesty is the best policy? Is Kant right in thinking there is no
right to refrain from trust? Surely it is indecent. For Kant, there is no
motivation or ‘motive,’ pure or impure, behind telling the truth – it’s just a
right, and an obligation – an imperative. Being trustworthy for Kant is
associated with a pure motive. Grice agrees. Decency comes into the picture. An
indecent agent may still be rational, but in such a case, conversation may
still be seen as rational (if not reasonable) and surely not be seen as
rational helpfulness or co-operation, but rational adversarial competition,
rather, a zero-sum game. Grice found the etymology of ‘decent’ too obscure.
Short and Lewis have “dĕcet,” which they deem cognate with Sanscrit “dacas,”
‘fame,’ and Grecian “δοκέω,‘to seem,’ ‘to think,’ and with Latin ‘decus,’
‘dingus.’ As an impersonal verb, Short and Lewis render it as ‘it is seemly,
comely, becoming,; it beseems, behooves, is fitting, suitable, proper (for syn.
v. debeo init.): decere quasi aptum esse consentaneumque tempori et personae,
Cic. Or. 22, 74; cf. also nunc quid aptum sit, hoc est, quid maxime deceat in
oratione videamus, id. de Or. 3, 55, 210 (very freq. and class.; not in
Caesar). Grice’s idea of decency is connected to his explorations on rational
and reasonable. To cheat may be neither unreasonable nor rational. It is
just repulsive. Indecent, in other words. In all this, Grice is concerned
with ordinary language, and treasures Austin questioning Warnock, when Warnock
was pursuing a fellowship at Magdalen. “What would you say the difference is
between ‘Smith plays cricket rather properly’ and ‘Smith plays cricket rather
incorrectly’?” They spent the whole dinner over the subtlety. By desserts,
Warnock was in love with Austin. Cf. Grice on his prim and proper Aunt
Matilda. The exploration by Grice on trust is Warnockian in character, or vice
versa. In “Object of morality,” Warnock has trust as key, as indeed, the very
object of morality. Grice starts to focus on trust in an Oxford seminars on the
implicaturum. If there is a desideratum of conversational candour, and the goal
of the principle of conversational helpfulness is that of giving and receiving
information, and influencing and being influenced by others, ‘false’
‘information’ is just no information – Since exhibiteness trumps protrepsis,
this applies to the buletic, too. Grice loved that Latin dictum, “tuus candor.”
He makes an early defence of this in his fatal objection to Malcolm. A
philosopher cannot intentionally instill a falsehood in his tutee, such as
“Decapitation willed the death of Charles I” (the alleged paraphrase of the
paradoxical philosopher saying that ‘causing’ is ‘willing’ and rephrasing
“Decapitation was the cause of the death of Charles I.” There is, for both
Grice and Apel, a transcendental (if weak) justification, not just utilitarian
(honesty as the best policy), as Stalnaker notes in his contribution to the
Grice symposium for APA. Unlike Apel, the transcendental argument is a weak one
in that Grice aims to show that conversation that did not abide by trust would
be unreasonable, but surely still ‘possible.’ It is not a transcendental
justification for the ‘existence’ of conversation simpliciter, but for the
existence of ‘reasonable,’ decent conversation. If we approach charity in the
first person, we trust ourselves that some of our beliefs have to be true, and
that some of our desires have to be satisfactory valid, and we are equally
trusted by our conversational partners. This is Grice’s conversational golden
rule. What would otherwise be the point of holding that conversation is
rational co-operation? What would be the point of conversation simpliciter?
Urmson follows Austin, so Austin’s considerations on this, notably in “Other
minds,” deserve careful examination. Urmson was of course a member of Grice’s
play group, and these are the philosophers that we consider top priority.
Another one was P. H. Nowell-Smith. At least two of his three rules deserve
careful examination. Nowell-Smith notes that this or that ‘rule’ of contextual
implication is not meant to be taken as a ‘rigid rule’. Unlike this or that
rule of entailment, a conversational rule can be broken without the utterer
being involved in self-contradiction or absurdity. When U uses an expression to
make a statement, it is contextually implied that he believes it to be true.
Similarly, when he uses it to perform any of the other jobs for which sentences
are used, it is contextually implied that he is using it for one of the jobs
that it normally does. This rule is often in fact broken. Anti-Kantian lying,
Bernhard-type play-acting, Andersen-type story-telling, and Wildeian irony is
each a case in which U breaks the rule, or flouts the expectation, either
overtly or covertly. But each of these four cases is a secondary use, i.e. a
use to which an expression cannot logically or conceptually be put unless, as
Hart would have it, it has a primary use. There is no limit to the possible
uses to which an expression may be put. In many cases a man makes his point by
deliberately using an expression in a queer way or even using it in the ‘sense’
opposite to its unique normal one, as in irony (“He is a fine friend,” implying
that he is a scoundrel). The distinction between a primary and a secondary use
is important because many an argument used by a philosopher consists in
pointing out some typical example of the way in which some expression E is
used. Such an argument is always illegitimate if the example employed is an
example of a secondary use, however common such a use may be. U contextually
implies that he has what he himself believes to be good reasons for his
statement. Once again, we often break this rule and we have special devices for
indicating when we are breaking it. Phrases such as ‘speaking offhand …,’ 'I do
not really know but …,’ and ‘I should be inclined to say that …,’ are used by
scrupulous persons to warn his addressee that U has not got what seem to him
good reasons for his statement. But unless one of these guarding phrases is
used we are entitled to believe that U believes himself to have good reasons
for his statement and we soon learn to *mistrust* people who habitually
infringe this rule. It is, of course, a mistake to infer from what someone says
categorically that he has in fact good reasons for what he says. If I tell you,
or ‘inform’ to you, that the duck-billed platypus is a bird (because I '
remember ' reading this in a book) I am unreliable; but I am not using language
improperly. But if I tell you this without using one of the guarding phrases
and without having what I think good reasons, I am. What U says may be assumed
to be relevant to the interests of his addressee. This is the most important of
the three rules; unfortunately it is also the most frequently broken. Bores are
more common than liars or careless talkers. This rule is particularly obvious
in the case of answers to questions, since it is assumed that the answer is an
answer. Not all statements are answers to questions; information may be
volunteered. Nevertheless the publication of a text-book on trigonometry
implies that the author believes that there are people who want to learn about
trigonometry, and to give advice implies a belief that the advice is relevant
to one’s addressee's problem. This rule is of the greatest importance for
ethics. For the major problem of ethics is that of bridging the gap between a
decisions, an ought-sentence, an injunction, and a sentence used to give advice
on the one hand and the statements of *fact*, sometime regarding the U’s soul,
that constitute the reasons for these on the other. It is in order to bridge
these gaps that insight into necessary synthetic connexions is invoked. This
rule of contextual implication may help us to show that there is no gap to be
bridged because the reason-giving sentence must turn out to be also *practical*
from the start and not a statement of *fact*, even concerning the state of the
U’s soul, from which a practical sentence can somehow be deduced. This rule is,
therefore, more than a rule of good manners; or rather it shows how, in matters
of ordinary language, rules of good manners shade into logical rules. Unless we
assume that it is being observed we cannot understand the connexions between
decisions, advice, and appraisals and the reasons given in support of them. Refs.: The main reference is in the first set of ‘Logic and
conversation.’ Many keywords are useful, not just ‘candour,’ but notably ‘trust.’
(“Rationality and trust,” c. 9-f. 5, “Trust, metaphysics, and value,” c. 9-f.
20, and “Aristotle and friendship, rationality, trust, and decency,” c. 6-f.
18), BANC.
desideratum of conversational
clarity. There is some overlap here with
Grice’s category of conversational manner – of Grice’s maxim of conversational
perspicuity [sic] – and at least one of the maxims proper, ‘obscuirty
avoidance,’ or maxim of conversational obscurity avoidance. But at Oxford he
defined the philosopher as the one whose profession it is to makes clear things
obscure. The word desideratum has to be taken seriously. It involves freedom.
In what way is “The pillar box seems red to me” less perspicuous than “The
pillar box is red”? In all! If mutual expectation not to mislead and produce
the stronger contribution are characteristics of candour, expectation of mutual
relevance to interests, and being explicit and clear in your point are two
characteristics of this desideratum. “Candour” and “clarity’ are somewhat
co-relative for Grice. He is interested in identifying this or that
desideratum. By having two of them, he can play. So, how UNCLEAR can a
conversationalist be provided he WANTS to be candid? Candour trumps clarity.
But too much ‘unperspicuity’ may lead to something not being deemed an ‘implicaturum’
at all. Grice is especially concerned with philosopher’s paradoxes. Why would
Strawson say that the usage of ‘not,’ ‘and,’ ‘or,’ ‘if,’ ‘if and only if,’
‘all,’ ‘some (at least one), ‘the,’ do not correspond to the logician’s use?
Questions of candour and clarity interact. Grice’s first application, which he
grants is not original, relates to “The pillar box seems red” versus “The
pillar box is red.” “I would not like to give the false impression that the
pillar box is not red” seems less clear than “The pillar box is red” – Yet the
unperspicuous contributin is still ‘candid,’ in the sense that it expresses a
truth. So one has to be careful. On top, philosophers like Lewis were using
‘clarity is not enough’ as a battle cry! Grice’s favourite formulations of the
imperatives here are ‘self-contradictory,’ and for which he uses ‘[sic]’,
notably: “Be perspicuous [sic]’ and “Be brief. Avoid unnecessary prolixity
[sic].’ Desirabile, neuter, out of ‘desideratum’ – so by using ‘desirability,’
Grice is getting into the modals -- desirability: Correlative: credibility.
For Grice, credibility reduces to desirability (He suggests that the reverse
may also be possible but does not give a proposal). This Grice calls the
Jeffrey operator. If Urmson likes ‘probably,’ Grice likes ‘desirably.’ This theorem
is a corollary of the desirability axiom by Jeffrey, which is: "If prob XY
= 0, for a prima facie PF(A V B) A (x E
w)] = PFA A (x E w)] + PfB A (x El+ w)]. This is the account by Grice of the
adaptability of a pirot to its changeable environs. Grice borrows the
notion of probability (henceforth, “pr”) from Davidson, whose early claim to
fame was to provide the logic of the notion. Grice abbreviates probability
by Pr. and compares it to a buletic operator ‘pf,’ ‘for prima facie,’ attached
to ‘De’ for desirability. A rational agent must calculate both the probability
and the desirability of his action. For both probability and desirability,
the degree is crucial. Grice symbolises this by d: probability in degree d;
probability in degree d. The topic of life Grice relates to that of
adaptation and surival, and connects with his genitorial programme of creature
construction (Pology.): life as continued operancy. Grice was fascinated with
life (Aristotle, bios) because bios is what provides for Aristotle the definition
(not by genus) of psyche. The steps are as follows. Pf(p ⊃!q)/Pr(p ⊃ q); pf((p1 ^ p2) ⊃!q)/pr(p1
^ p2 ⊃q);
pf((p1 ^ p2 ^ p3) ⊃!q)/pr(p1 ^ p2 ^ p3 ^ p4 ⊃q);
pf (all things before me ⊃!q)/pr (all things before me ⊃
q); pf (all things considered ⊃ !q)/pr(all things considered ⊃ q); !q/|- q; G wills !q/G judges q. Strictly, Grice avoids
using the noun probability (other than for the title of this or that lecture).
One has to use the sentence-modifier ‘probably,’ and ‘desirably.’ So the
specific correlative to the buletic prima facie ‘desirably’ is the doxastic ‘probably.’
Grice liked the Roman sound to ‘prima facie,’ ‘at first sight’: “exceptio, quae prima facie justa videatur.” Refs.:
The two main sources are “Probability, desirability, and mood operators,” c.
2-f. 11, and “Modality, desirability and probability,” c. 8-ff. 14-15. But most
of the material is collected in “Aspects,” especially in the third and fourth
lectures. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
Non-detachability. A rather abstract notion. One thinks of ‘detach’ in
physical terms (‘semi-detached house’). Grice means it in an abstract way. To
detach – what is it that we detach? We detach an implicaturum. Grice is not so
much concerned with how to DETACH an implicaturum, but how sometimes you
cannot. It’s NON-detachability that is the criterion. And this should be a
matter of a prioricity. However, since style gets in the picture, he has to
allow for exceptions to this criterion. A conversational, even philosophically interesting
one, generated by the conversational category of modus (as the maxim of
orderliness: “he went to bed and took off his boots”) is detachable. How to
interpret this in an one-off predicament. Cf. non-detachability. And the other
features or tests or catalysts that Grice uses. In Causal Theory of Perception,
the ideas are FOUR, which he nicely summarises in WoW on the occasion of
eliminating the excursus. And then he expands on Essay II, as an update. His
tutees at Oxford are aware of the changes. Few care, though. Even his
colleagues don’t, they are into their own things. So let’s compare the two
versions of the catalysts in Causal and Essay II. Version of the four catalysts
up to the first two examples in “Causal”: The first cxample is a stock case of what
is sometimes called " prcsupposition " and it is often held that here
1he truth of what is irnplicd is a necessary condition of the original
statement's beirrg cither true or false. This might be disputed, but it is at
lcast arguable that it is so, and its being arguable might be enough to
distinguish-this type of case from others. I shall however for convenience
assume that the common view mentioned is correct. This consideration clearly
distinguishes (1) from (2); even if the implied proposition were false, i.e. if
there were no reason in the world to contrast poverty with honesty either in
general or in her case, the original statement could still be false; it would
be false if for example she were rich and dishonest. One might perhaps be less
comfortable about assenting to its truth if the implied contrast did not in
fact obtain; but the possibility of falsity is enough for the immediate
purpose. My next experiment on these examples is to ask what it is in each case
which could properly be said to be the vehicle of implication (to do the
implying). There are at least four candidates, not necessarily mutually
exclusive. Supposing someone to have uttered one or other of my sample
sentences, we may ask whether the vehicle of implication would be (a) what the
speaker said (or asserted), or (b) the speaker (" did he imply that . . .
.':) or (c) the words the speaker used, or (d) his saying that (or again his
saying that in that way); or possibly some plurality of these items. As regards
(a) I think (1) and (2) differ; I think it would be correct to say in the case
of (l) that what he speaker said (or asserted) implied that Smith had been
beating this wife, and incorrect to say in the case of (2) that what te said
(or asserted) implied that there was a contrast between e.g., honesty and
poverty. A test on which I would rely is the following : if accepting that the
implication holds involves one in r27 128 H. P. GRICE accepting an
hypothetical' if p then q ' where 'p ' represents the original statement and '
q' represents what is implied, then what the speaker said (or asserted) is a
vehicle of implication, otherwise not. To apply this rule to the given
examples, if I accepted the implication alleged to hold in the case of (1), I
should feel compelled to accept the hypothetical " If Smith has left off
beating his wife, then he has been beating her "; whereas if I accepted
the alleged implication in the case of (2), I should not feel compelled to
accept the hypothetical " If she was poor but honest, then there is some
contrast between poverty and honesty, or between her poverty and her
honesty." The other candidates can be dealt with more cursorily; I should
be inclined to say with regard to both (l) and (2) that the speaker could be
said to have implied whatever it is that is irnplied; that in the case of (2)
it seems fairly clear that the speaker's words could be said to imply a
contrast, whereas it is much less clear whether in the case of (1) the
speaker's words could be said to imply that Smith had been beating his wife;
and that in neither case would it be evidently appropriate to speak of his
saying that, or of his saying that in that way, as implying what is implied.
The third idea with which I wish to assail my two examples is really a twin
idea, that of the detachability or cancellability of the implication. (These
terms will be explained.) Consider example (1): one cannot fi.nd a form of
words which could be used to state or assert just what the sentence "
Smith has left off beating his wife " might be used to assert such that
when it is used the implication that Smith has been beating his wife is just
absent. Any way of asserting what is asserted in (1) involves the irnplication
in question. I shall express this fact by saying that in the case of (l) the
implication is not detqchable from what is asserted (or simpliciter, is not
detachable). Furthermore, one cannot take a form of words for which both what
is asserted and what is implied is the same as for (l), and then add a further
clause withholding commitment from what would otherwise be implied, with the
idea of annulling the implication without annulling the assertion. One cannot
intelligibly say " Smith has left off beating his wife but I do not mean
to imply that he has been beating her." I shall express this fact by
saying that in the case of (1) the implication is not cancellable (without THE
CAUSAL THEORY OF PERCEPTION r29 cancelling the assertion). If we turn to (2) we
find, I think, that there is quite a strong case for saying that here the implication
ls detachable. Thcrc sccms quitc a good case for maintaining that if, instead
of sayirrg " She is poor but shc is honcst " I were to say " She
is poor and slre is honcst", I would assert just what I would havc
asscrtcct ii I had used thc original senterrce; but there would now be no
irnplication of a contrast between e.g', povery and honesty. But the question
whether, in tl-re case of (2), thc inrplication is cancellable, is slightly
more cornplex. Thcrc is a sonse in which we may say that it is non-cancellable;
if sorncone were to say " She is poor but she is honest, though of course
I do not mean to imply that there is any contrast between poverty and honesty
", this would seem a puzzling and eccentric thing to have said; but though
we should wish to quarrel with the speaker, I do not think we should go so far
as to say that his utterance was unintelligible; we should suppose that he had
adopted a most peculiar way of conveying the the news that she was poor and
honesl. The fourth and last test that I wish to impose on my exarnples is to
ask whether we would be inclined to regard the fact that the appropriate
implication is present as being a matter of the meaning of some particular word
or phrase occurring in the sentences in question. I am aware that this may not
be always a very clear or easy question to answer; nevertheless Iwill risk the
assertion that we would be fairly happy to say that, as regards (2), the
factthat the implication obtains is a matter of the meaning of the word ' but
'; whereas so far as (l) is concerned we should have at least some inclination
to say that the presence of the implication was a matter of the meaning of some
of the words in the sentence, but we should be in some difficulty when it came
to specifying precisely which this word, or words are, of which this is true.
After third example introduced:It is plain that there is no case at all for
regarding the truth of what is implied here as a pre-condition of the truth or
falsity cf 130 H. P. GRICB what I have asserted; a denial of the truth of what
is implied would have no bearing at all on whether what I have asserted is true
or false. So (3) is much closer to (2) than (1) in this respect. Next, I (the
speaker) could certainly be said to have implied that Jones is hopeless
(provided that this is what I intended to get across) and my saying that (at
any rate my saying /s/ that and no more) is also certainly a vehicle of
implication. On the other hand my words and what I say (assert) are, I think,
not here vehicles of implication. (3) thus differs from both (1) and (2). The
implication is cancellable but not detachable; if I add o'I do not of course
mean to imply that he is no good at philosophy " my whole utterance is
intelligible and linguistically impeccable, even though it may be extraordinary
tutorial behaviour; and I can no longer be said to have implied that he was no
good, even though perhaps that is what my colleagues might conclude to be the
case if I had nothing else to say. The implication is not however, detachable;
any other way of making, in the same context of utterance, just the assertion I
have made would involve the same implication. Finally, the fact that the
implication holds is not a matter of any particular word or phrase within the
sentence which I have uttered; so in this respect (3) is certainly different
from (2) and, possibly different from (1). One obvious fact should be mentioned
before I pass to the last example. This case of implication is unlike the
others in that the utterance of the sentence " Jones has beautiful
handwriting etc." does not standardly involve the implication here
attributed to it; it requires a special context (that it should be uttered at
Collections) to attach the implication to its uttgrance. After fourth and last
example is introduced: in the case of (a) I can produce a strong argument in
favour of holding that the fulfllment of the THE CAUSAL THEORY OF PERCEPTION
implication of the speaker's ignorance is not a precaution of the truth or
falsity of the disjunctive statement. Suppose (c) that the speaker knows that
his wife is in the kitchen, (b) that the house has only two rooms (and no
passages etc.) Even though (a) is the casc, thc spcaker can certainly say truly
" My wife is in the housc "; he is merely not being as informative as
he could bc if nccd arose. But the true proposition that his wife is in thc
housc together with the true proposition that the house consists entirely of a
kitchen and a bedroom, entail the proposition that his wife is either in the
kitchen or in the bedroom. But il to cxpress the proposition p in certain
circumstances would bc to spcak truly, and p, togelher with another true
proposition, crrtails q, then surely to express 4 in the same circvmstances
must be to speak truly. So I shall take it that the disjunctive statement in
(4) does not fail to be true or false if the implied ignorance is in fact not
realized. Secondly, I think it is fairly clear that in this case, as in the
case of (3), we could say that the speaker had irnplied that he did not know,
and also that his saying that (or his saying that rather than something else,
v2., in which room she was) implied that he did not know. Thirdly, the
irnplication is in a sense non-detachable, in that if in a given context the
utterance of the disjunctive sentence would involve the implication that the
speaker did not know in which room his his wife was, this implication would
also be involved in the utterance of any other form of words which would make
the same assertion(e.g., "The alternatives are (1) .(2) " or "
One of the following things is the case: (a) (r) "). ln another possible
sense, however, the implication could perhaps bc said to be detachable: for
there will be some contexls of ruttcrance in Which the normal implication will
not hold; e.g., thc spokesman who announces, " The next conference will be
cither in Geneva or in New York " perhaps does not imply that lrc does not
know which; for he may well be just not saying which. This points to the fact
that the implication is cancellablg; :r nrarl could say, " My wife is
either in the kitchen or in the bctlroorn " in circumstances in which the
implication would rrornrally be present, and then go on, " Mind you, I'm
not saying tlrrrt I don't know which"; this might be unfriendly (and
grcr'lrrps ungrammatical) but would be perfectly intelligible, I2 131 132 H. P.
GRICB Finally, the fact that the utterance of the disjunctive sentence normally
involves the implication of the speaker's ignorance of the truth-values of the
disjuncts is, I should like to say, to be explained by reference to a general
principle governing the use of language. Exactly what this principle is I am
uncertain, but L first sftol would be the following: "One should not make
a weaker statement rather than a stronger one unless there is a good reason for
so doing." This is certainly not an adequate formulation but will perhaps
be good enough for my present purpose. On the assumption that such a principle
as this is of general application, one can draw the conclusion that the utterance
of a disjunctive sentence would imply the speaker's ignorance of the
truth-values of the disjuncts, given that (a) the obvious reason for not making
a statemcnt which there is some call on one to make is that one is not in a
position to make it, and given (6) the logical fact that each disjunct entails
the disjunctive, but not vice versa; which being so, the disjuncts are stronger
than the disjunctive. lf the outline just given js on the right lines, then I
would wish to say, we have a reason for refusing in the case of (4) to regard
the implication of the speaker's ignorance as being part of the meaning of the
word'or'; someone who knows about the logical relation between a disjunction
and its disjuncts, and who also knew about the alleged general principle
governing discourse, could work out for hirnself that disjunctive utterances
would involve the implication which they do in fact involve. I must insist,
however, that my aim in discussing this last point has been merelyto indicate
the position I would wish to take up, and not to argue scriously in favour of
it. My main purpose in this sub-section has been to introduce four ideas of
which l intend to make some use; and to provide some conception of tlre ways in
which they apply or fail to apply to various types of implication. By the
numbering of it, it seems he has added an extra. It’s FIVE catalysts now. He’ll
go back to them in Essay IV, and in Presupposition and Conversational
Impicature. He needs those catalysts. Why? It seems like he is always thinking
that someone will challenge him! This is Grice: “We can now show that, it
having been stipulated as being what it is, a conversational implicaturum must
possess certain features. Or rather here are some catalyst ideas which will
help us to determine or individuate. Four tests for implicaturum as it were. First,
CANCELLABILITY – as noted in “Causal Theory” – for two of the examples
(‘beautiful handwriting’ and ‘kitchen or bedroom’ and NEGATIVE version of “You
don’t cease to eat iron”) and the one of the pillar box -- Since, to assume the
presence of a conversational implicum, we have to assume that the principle of
conversational co-operation is being observed, and since it is possible to opt
out of the observation of this principle, it follows that an implicaturum can
be canceled in a particular case. It may be explicitly canceled, if need there
be, by the addition of a clause by which the utterer states or implies that
he has opted out (e. g. “The pillar box
seems red but it is.”). Then again it may be contextually (or implicitly)
canceled (e. g. to a very honest person, who knows I disbelieve the examiner
exists, “The loyalty examiner won’t be summoning you at any rate”). The
utterance that usually would carry an implicaturum is used on an occasion that
makes it clear or obvious that the utterer IS opting out without having to bore
his addressee by making this obviousness explicit. There is a second litmus
test or catalyst idea. nsofar as the calculation that a implicaturum is present
requires, besides contextual and background information only a knowledge or
understanding or processing of what has been said or explicitly conveyed (‘are
you playing squash? B shows bandaged leg) (or the ‘conventional’ ‘commitment’ of
the utterance), and insofar as the manner or style, of FORM, rather than
MATTER, of expression plays no role in the calculation, it will NOT be possible
to find another way of explicitly conveying or putting forward the same thing, the
same so-and-so (say that q follows from p) which simply ‘lacks’ the unnecessary
implicaturum in question -- except [will his excluders never end?] where some
special feature of the substituted version [this other way which he says is not
conceivable] is itself relevant to the determination of the implicaturum (in
virtue of this or that conversational maxims pertaining to the category of
conversational mode. If we call this feature, as Grice does in “Causal Theory,”
‘non-detachability’ – in that the implicaturum cannot be detached from any
alternative expression that makes the same point -- one may expect the implicaturum
carried by this or that locution to have a high degree of non-detachability. ALTERNATIVES
FOR “NOT” Not, it is not the case, it is false that. There’s nothing unique
about ‘not’.ALTERNATIVES FOR “AND” and, nothing, furthermore, but. There isnothing
unique about ‘and’ALTERNATIVES FOR “OR”: One of the following is true. There is
nothing unique about ‘or’ALTERNATIVES FOR “IF” Provided. ‘There is nothing
unique about ‘if’ALTERNATIVES FOR “THE” – There is at least one and at most
one. And it exists. (existence and uniqueness). There is nothing unique about
‘the’.THIS COVERS STRAWSON’S first problem.What about the other English
philosophers?AUSTIN – on ‘voluntarily’ ALTERNATIVES to ‘voluntarily,’ with the
will, willingly, intentionally. Nothing unique about ‘voluntarily.’STRAWSON on
‘true’ – it is the case, redundance theory, nothing. Nothing unique about
‘true’HART ON good. To say that ‘x is commendable’ is to recommend x. Nothing
unique about ‘good.’HART on ‘carefully.’ Da Vinci painted Mona Lisa carefully,
with caution, with precaution. Nothing unique about ‘carefully.’THIRD LITMUS
TEST or idea. To speak approximately, since the calculation of the presence of
an implicaturum presupposes an initial knowledge, or grasping, or
understanding, or taking into account of the ‘conventional’ force (not in
Austin’s sense, but translating Latin ‘vis’) of the expression the utterance of
which carries the implicaturum, a conversational implicaturum will be a
condition that is NOT, be definition, on risk of circularity of otiosity,
included in the original specification of the expression's conventional force.
If I’m saying that ‘seems’ INVOLVES, as per conventional force, ‘doubt or
denial,’what’s my point? If Strawson is right that ‘if’ has the conventional
force of conventionally committing the utterer with the belief that q follows
from p, why bother? And if that were so, how come the implicaturum is still
cancellable?Though it may not be impossible for what starts life, so to speak,
as a conversational implicaturum to become conventionalized, to suppose that
this is so in a given case would require special justification. (Asking Lewis).
So, initially at least, a conversational implicaturum is, by definition and
stipulation, not part of the sense, truth-condition, conventional force, or
part of what is explicitly conveyed or put forward, or ‘meaning’ of the expression
to the employment of which the impicatum attaches. FOURTH LITMUS TEST or
catalyst idea.Mentioned in “Causal theory” The alethic value – conjoined with
the test about the VEHICLE --. He has these as two different tests in “Causal”.
Since the truth of a conversational implicaturum is not required by (is not a
condition for) the truth of what is said or explicitly conveyed (what is said or
explicated – the explicatum or explcitum, or what is explicitly conveyed or
communicated) may be true -- what is implicated may be false – that he has
beautiful handwriting, that q follows from p, that the utterer is ENDORSING
what someone else said, that the utterer is recommending x, that the person who
is said to act carefully has taken precaution), the implicaturum is NOT carried
by what is said or the EXPLICATUM or EXPLICITUM, or is explicitly conveyed, but
only by the ‘saying’ or EXPLICATING or EXPLICITING of what is said or of the
explicatum or explicitum, or by 'putting it that way.’.The fifth and last
litmus test or catalyst idea. Since, to calculate a conversational implicaturum
is to calculate what has to be supposed in order to preserve the supposition
that the utterer is a rational, benevolent, altruist agent, and that the principle
of conversational cooperation is being observed, and since there may be various
possible specific explanations or alternatives that fill the gap here – as to
what is the content of the psychological attitude to be ascribed to the utterer,
a list of which may be open, or open-ended, the conversational implicaturum in
such cases will technically be an open-ended disjunction of all such specific
explanations, which may well be infinitely non-numerable. Since the list of
these IS open, the implicaturum will have just the kind of INDETERMINACY or
lack of determinacy that an implicaturum appears in most cases to possess.
determinatum: determinable, a
general characteristic or property analogous to a genus except that while a
property independent of a genus differentiates a species that falls under the
genus, no such independent property differentiates a determinate that falls
under the determinable. The color blue, e.g., is a determinate with respect of
the determinable color: there is no property F independent of color such that a
color is blue if and only if it is F. In contrast, there is a property, having
equal sides, such that a rectangle is a square if and only if it has this
property. Square is a properly differentiated species of the genus rectangle.
W. E. Johnson introduces the terms ‘determinate’ and ‘determinable’ in his
Logic, Part I, Chapter 11. His account of this distinction does not closely
resemble the current understanding sketched above. Johnson wants to explain the
differences between the superficially similar ‘Red is a color’ and ‘Plato is a
man’. He concludes that the latter really predicates something, humanity, of
Plato; while the former does not really predicate anything of red. Color is not
really a property or adjective, as Johnson puts it. The determinates red, blue,
and yellow are grouped together not because of a property they have in common
but because of the ways they differ from each other. Determinates under the
same determinable are related to each other and are thus comparable in ways in
which they are not related to determinates under other determinables.
Determinates belonging to different determinables, such as color and shape, are
incomparable. ’More determinate’ is often used interchangeably with ‘more
specific’. Many philosophers, including Johnson, hold that the characters of
things are absolutely determinate or specific. Spelling out what this claim
means leads to another problem in analyzing the relation between determinate
and determinable. By what principle can we exclude red and round as a
determinate of red and red as a determinate of red or round? determinism, the view that every event or
state of affairs is brought about by antecedent events or states of affairs in
accordance with universal causal laws that govern the world. Thus, the state of
the world at any instant determines a unique future, and that knowledge of all
the positions of things and the prevailing natural forces would permit an
intelligence to predict the future state of the world with absolute precision.
This view was advanced by Laplace in the early nineteenth century; he was
inspired by Newton’s success at integrating our physical knowledge of the
world. Contemporary determinists do not believe that Newtonian physics is the
supreme theory. Some do not even believe that all theories will someday be
integrated into a unified theory. They do believe that, for each event, no
matter how precisely described, there is some theory or system of laws such
that the occurrence of that event under that description is derivable from
those laws together with information about the prior state of the system. Some
determinists formulate the doctrine somewhat differently: a every event has a
sufficient cause; b at any given time, given the past, only one future is
possible; c given knowledge of all antecedent conditions and all laws of
nature, an agent could predict at any given time the precise subsequent history
of the universe. Thus, determinists deny the existence of chance, although they
concede that our ignorance of the laws or all relevant antecedent conditions
makes certain events unexpected and, therefore, apparently happen “by chance.”
The term ‘determinism’ is also used in a more general way as the name for any
metaphysical doctrine implying that there is only one possible history of the
world. The doctrine described above is really scientific or causal determinism,
for it grounds this implication on a general fact about the natural order,
namely, its governance by universal causal law. But there is also theological
determinism, which holds that God determines everything that happens or that,
since God has perfect knowledge about the universe, only the course of events
that he knows will happen can happen. And there is logical determinism, which
grounds the necessity of the historical order on the logical truth that all
propositions, including ones about the future, are either true or false.
Fatalism, the view that there are forces e.g., the stars or the fates that
determine all outcomes independently of human efforts or wishes, is claimed by
some to be a version of determinism. But others deny this on the ground that
determinists do not reject the efficacy of human effort or desire; they simply
believe that efforts and desires, which are sometimes effective, are themselves
determined by antecedent factors as in a causal chain of events. Since
determinism is a universal doctrine, it embraces human actions and choices. But
if actions and choices are determined, then some conclude that free will is an
illusion. For the action or choice is an inevitable product of antecedent
factors that rendered alternatives impossible, even if the agent had
deliberated about options. An omniscient agent could have predicted the action
or choice beforehand. This conflict generates the problem of free will and
determinism.
deutero-esperanto: Also Gricese – Pirotese. “Gricese” is best. Arbitrariness
need not be a two-party thing. E communicates to himself that there is danger
by drawing a skull. Grice genially opposed to the idea of a convention. He
hated a convention. A language is not conventional. Meaning is not
conventional. Communication is not conventional. He was even unhappy with the account
of convention by Lewis in terms of an arbitrary co-ordination. While the
co-ordination bit passes rational muster, the arbitrary element is deemed a
necessary condition, and Grice hated that. For Grice there is natural, and
iconic. When a representation ceases to be iconic and becomes, for lack of a
better expression, non-iconic, things get, we may assume conventional. One form
of correlation in his last definition of meaing allows for a conventional
correlation. “Pain!,” the P cries. There is nothing in /pein/ that minimally
resembles the pain the P is suffering. So from his involuntary “Ouch” to his
simulated “Ouch,” he thinks he can say “Pain.” Bennett explored the stages after
that. The dog is shaggy is Grices example. All sorts of resultant procedures
are needed for reference and predication, which may be deemed conventional. One
may refer nonconventionally, by ostension. It seems more difficult to predicate
non-conventionally. But there may be iconic predication. Urquhart promises
twelve parts of speech: each declinable in eleven cases, four numbers, eleven
genders (including god, goddess, man, woman, animal, etc.); and conjugable in
eleven tenses, seven moods, and four voices. The language will translate any
idiom in any other language, without any alteration of the literal sense, but
fully representing the intention. Later, one day, while lying in his bath,
Grice designed deutero-esperanto. The obble is fang may be current only
for Griceian members of the class of utterers. It is only this or that
philosophers practice to utter The obble is fang in such-and-such
circumstances. In this case, the utterer U does have a readiness to utter The
obble is feng in such-and-such circumstances. There is also the scenario in
which The obble is fang is may be conceived by the philosopher not to be deemed
current at all, but the utterance of The obble is feng in such-and-such
circumstances is part of some system of communication which the utterer U
(Lockwith,, Urquart, Wilkins, Edmonds, Grice) has devised but which has never
been put into operation, like the highway code which Grice invent another day
again while lying in his bath. In that case, U does this or that basic or
resultant procedure for the obble is feng in an attenuated but philosophically
legitimate fashion. U has envisaged a possible system of practices which
involve a readiness to utter Example by Grice that does NOT involve a
convention in this usage. Surely Grice can as he indeed did, invent a
language, call it Deutero-Esperanto, Griceish, or Pirotese, which nobody
at Oxford ever uses to communicat. That makes Grice the authority - cf. arkhe,
authority, government (in plural), "authorities" - and Grice can lay
down, while lying in the tub, no doubt - what is proper. A P can be said
to potch of some obble o as fang or as feng. Also to cotch of some obble
o, as fang or feng; or to cotch of one obble o and another obble o as being fid
to one another.” In symbols: (Ex)(Ey).Px ^ Oy ^ potch(x, y, fang) (Ex)(Ey).Px ^
Oy ^ potch(x, y, feng) (Ex)(Ey).Px ^ Oy ^ cotch(x, y, fang) (Ex)(Ey).Px ^ Ox ^
cotch(x, y, feng) (Ex)(Ey).Px ^ Oz ^ Oy ^ cotch(x, fid(y,z)). Let’s say that Ps
(as Russell and Carnap conceived them) inhabit a world of obbles, material
objects, or things. To potch is something like to perceive; to cotch something
like to think. Feng and fang are possible descriptions, much like our adjectives.
Fid is a possible relation between obbles. Grice provides a symbolisation for
content internalisation. The perceiver or cognitive Subjects perceives or
cognises two objects, x, y, as holding a relation of some type. There is
a higher level that Ps can reach when the object of their potchings and
cotchings is not so much objects but states of affairs. Its then that the
truth-functional operators will be brought to existence “^”: cotch(p ^ q)
“V”: cotch(p v q) “)”: )-cotch(p ) q) A P will be able to reject a
content, refuse-thinking: ~. Cotch(~p). When P1 perceives P2, the reciprocals
get more complicated. P2 cotches that P1!-judges that p. Grice
uses ψ1 for potching and ψ2
for cotching. If P2 is co-operative, and abides by "The Ps Immanuel,"
P2 will honour, in a Kantian benevolent way, his partners goal by adopting
temporarily his partners goal potch(x (portch(y, !p)) ⊃ potch(x, !p). But by then, its hardly simpler
ways. Especially when the Ps outdo their progenitor Carnap as metaphysicians.
The details are under “eschatology,” but the expressions are here “α izzes α.” This
would be the principle of non-contradiction or identity. P1 applies it war, and
utters War is war which yields a most peculiar implicaturum. “if α izzes
β ∧ β izzes γ, α izz γ.” This is transitivity, which is
crucial for Ps to overcome Berkeley’s counterexample to Locke, and define their
identity over time. “if α hazzes β, α izzes β.” Or, what is accidental is not
essential. A P may allow that what is essential is accidental while misleading,
is boringly true. “α hazzes β iff α hazzes x ∧ x izzes β.” “If β is a katholou or universalium, β is
an eidos or forma.” For surely Ps need not be stupid to fail to see
squarrelhood. “if α hazzes β ∧ α
izzes a particular, γ≠α ∧ α izz β.” “α izzes predicable
of β iff ((β izzes α) ∨ (∃x)(β hazzes x ∧ x
izzes α). “α izzes essentially predicable of β ⊃⊂ β izzes α α
izzes non-essentially/accidentally predicable of β ⊃⊂ (∃x)(β hazzes x ∧ x
izzes α). α = β iff α izzes β ∧ β
izzes α. “α izzes an atomon, or individuum ⊃⊂ □(∀β)(β izzes α ⊃ α
izzes β). “α izzes a particular ⊃⊂ □(∀β)(α izzes predicable of β ⊃ (α izzes β ∧ β
izzes α)). α izzes a universalium ⊃⊂ ◊(∃β)(α izzes predicable of α ∧ ~(α izzes β ∧ β
izzes α). α izzes some-thing ⊃ α
izzes an individuum. α izzes an eidos or forma ⊃ (α izzes some-thing ∧ α izzes a universalium); α izzes predicable of β ⊃⊂ (β izzes α) ∨ (∃x)(β hazzes x ∧ x
izzes α). “ α izzes essentially predicable of α α izzes accidentally
predicable of β ⊃ α ≠ β. ~(α izzes accidentally predicable of
β) ⊃ α ≠ β. α izzes an kathekaston or particular ⊃ α izzes an individuum; α izz a particular ⊃ ~(∃x)(x ≠ α ∧ x izz α). ~(∃x).(x
izzes a particular ∧ x izzes a forma) ⊢ α
izzes a forma ⊃ ~(∃x)(x ≠ α ∧ x izzes α). x izzes a particular ⊃ ~(∃β)(α izzes β); α izzes a forma ⊃ ((α izzes predicable of β ∧ α ≠ β) ⊃ β
hazzes α); α izzes a forma ∧ β
izzes a particular ⊃ (α izzes predicable of β ⊃⊂ β hazzes A); (α izzes a particular ∧ β izzes a universalium ∧ β izzes predicable of α) ⊃ (∃γ)(α ≠ γ ∧ γ
izzes essentially predicable of α). (∃x)
(∃y)(x izzes a particular ∧ y
izzes a universalium ∧ y izzes predicable of x ⊃ ~(∀x)(x izzes a universalium ∧ x izzes some-thing). (∀β)(β izzes a universalium ⊃ β izzes some-thing). α izzes a particular) ⊃ ~∃β.(α ≠ β ∧ β
izzes essentially predicable of α). (α izzes predicable of β ∧ α ≠ β) ⊃ α
izzes non-essentially or accidentally predicable of β. Grice
is following a Leibnizian tradition. A philosophical language is any
constructed language that is constructed from first principles or certain
ideologies. It is considered a type of engineered language.
Philosophical languages were popular in Early Modern times, partly motivated by
the goal of recovering the lost Adamic or Divine language. The term
“ideal language” is sometimes used near-synonymously, though more modern
philosophical languages such as “Toki Pona” are less likely to involve such an
exalted claim of perfection. It may be known as a language of pure
ideology. The axioms and grammars of the languages together differ from
commonly spoken languages today. In most older philosophical languages,
and some newer ones, words are constructed from a limited set of morphemes that
are treated as "elemental" or fundamental. "Philosophical
language" is sometimes used synonymously with "taxonomic
language", though more recently there have been several conlangs
constructed on philosophical principles which are not taxonomic. Vocabularies
of oligo-synthetic communication-systems are made of compound expressions,
which are coined from a small (theoretically minimal) set of morphemes;
oligo-isolating communication-systems, such as Toki Pona, similarly use a
limited set of root words but produce phrases which remain s. of distinct
words. Toki Pona is based on minimalistic simplicity, incorporating
elements of Taoism. Láadan is designed to lexicalize and grammaticalise the
concepts and distinctions important to women, based on muted group
theory. A priori languages are constructed languages where the vocabulary
is invented directly, rather than being derived from other existing languages
(as with Esperanto, or Grices Deutero-Esperanto, or Pirotese or Ido). It all
starts when Carnap claims to know that pritos karulise elatically. Grice as
engineer. Pirotese is the philosophers engaging in Pology. Actually, Pirotese
is the lingo the Ps parrot. Ps karulise elatically. But not all of
them. Grice finds that the Pological talk allows to start from
zero. He is constructing a language, (basic) Pirotese, and the
philosophical psychology and world that that language is supposed to represent
or denote. An obble is a Ps object. Grice introduces potching and
cotching. To potch, in Pirotese, is what a P does with an obble: he perceives
it. To cotch is Pirotese for what a P can further do with an obble: know or
cognise it. Cotching, unlike potching, is factive. Pirotese would
not be the first language invented by a philosopher. Deutero-Esperanto
-- Couturat, L., philosopher and logician who wrote on the history of
philosophy, logic, philosophy of mathematics, and the possibility of a
universal language. Couturat refuted Renouvier’s finitism and advocated an
actual infinite in The Mathematical Infinite 6. He argued that the assumption
of infinite numbers was indispensable to maintain the continuity of magnitudes.
He saw a precursor of modern logistic in Leibniz, basing his interpretation of
Leibniz on the Discourse on Metaphysics and Leibniz’s correspondence with
Arnauld. His epoch-making Leibniz’s Logic 1 describes Leibniz’s metaphysics as
panlogism. Couturat published a study on Kant’s mathematical philosophy Revue
de Métaphysique, 4, and defended Peano’s logic, Whitehead’s algebra, and
Russell’s logistic in The Algebra of Logic 5. He also contributed to André
Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie 6. Refs.: While the reference to “Deutero-Esperanto’ comes from
“Meaning revisited,” other keywords are useful, notably “Pirotese” and
“Symbolo.” Also keywords like “obble,” and “pirot.” The H. P. Grice Papers,
BANC.
diagoge: Grice makes a triad here: apagoge, diagoge, and epagoge. Cf.
Grice’s emphasis on the ‘argument’ involved in the conversational implciatum,
though. To work out an impilcatum is to reach it ‘by argument.’ No argument, no
conversational implicaturum. But cf. argument in Emissor draws skull and
communicates that there is danger. ARGUMENT involved in that Emissor intends
his addressee WILL REASON. Can the lady communicate to the pigeons that she is
selling ‘twopence a bag’ for their pleasure? Grice contrasted epagoge with
diagoge. Cooperation with competition. Cooperative game with competitive game. But
epagoge is induction, so here we’ll consider his views on probability and how
it contrastds with diagoge. The diagoge is easy to identity: Grice is a social
animal, with the BA, Philosophy, conferences, discussion, The American
Philosophical Association, transcripts by Randall Parker, from the audio-tapes
contained in c. 10 within the same s. IV miscellaneous, Beanfest, transcripts
and audio-cassettes, s. IV, c. 6-f. 8, and f. 10, and s. V, c. 8-f. 4-8 Unfortunately, Parker typed carulise
for karulise, or not. Re: probability, Grice loves to reminisce an anecdote
concerning his tutor Hardie at Corpus when Hardie invoked Mills principles
to prove that Hardie was not responsible for a traffic jam. In drafts on word
play, Grice would speak of not bringing more Grice to your Mill. Mills
System of Logic was part of the reading material for his degree in Lit.
Hum.at Oxford, so he was very familiar with it. Mill represents the best
of the English empiricist tradition. Grice kept an interest on inductive
methodology. In his Life and opinions he mentions some obscure essays by
Kneale and Keynes on the topic. Grice was interested in Kneales secondary
induction, since Grice saw this as an application of a
construction routine. He was also interested in Keyness notion of a
generator property, which he found metaphysically intriguing.
Induction. Induction ‒ Mill’s Induction, induction, deduction, abduction,
Mill. More Grice to the Mill. Grice loved Hardies playing with Mill’s
method of difference with an Oxford copper. He also quotes Kneale and Keynes on
induction. Note that his seven-step derivation of akrasia relies on an
inductive step! Grice was fortunate to associate with Davidson, whose initial
work is on porbability. Grice borrows from Davidson the idea that inductive
probability, or probable, attaches to the doxastic, while prima facie attaches
to desirably, or desirability. Jeffreys notion of desirability is
partition-invariant in that if a proposition, A, can be expressed as the
disjoint disjunction of both {B1, B2, B3} and {C1, C2, C3}, ∑ Bi ∈ AProb (Bi ∣∣ A).
Des (Bi) = ∑Ci ∈ A Prob (Ci ∣∣ A).
Des (Ci). It follows that applying the rule of desirability maximization
will always lead to the same recommendation, irrespective of how the decision
problem is framed, while an alternative theory may recommend different courses
of action, depending on how the decision problem is
formulated. Here, then, is the analogue of Jeffreys desirability
axiom (D), applied to sentences rather than propositions: (D) (prob(s and t) =
0 and prob(s or t) "# 0, ⊃ d
( ) prob(s)des(s)+ prob(t)des(t) es s or t =-"---- prob( s) + prob(t )
(Grice writes prob(s) for the Subjectsive probability of sand des(s) for the
desirability or utility of s.) B. Jeffrey admits that "desirability"
(his terms for evidential value) does not directly correspond to any single
pre-theoretical notion of desire. Instead, it provides the best systematic
explication of the decision theoretic idea, which is itself our best effort to
make precise the intuitive idea of weighing options. As Jeffrey remarks, it is
entirely possibly to desire someone’s love when you already have it. Therefore,
as Grice would follow, Jeffrey has the desirability operator fall under the
scope of the probability operator. The agents desire that p provided he judges
that p does not obtain. Diagoge/epagoge, Grices audio-files, the audio-files,
audio-files of various lectures and conferences, some seminars with Warner and
J. Baker, audio files of various lectures and conferences. Subjects: epagoge,
diagoge. A previous folder in the collection contains the transcripts.
These are the audio-tapes themselves, obviously not in folder. The kind of
metaphysical argument which I have in mind might be said, perhaps, to exemplify
a dia-gogic or trans-ductive as opposed to epa-gogic or in-ductive approach to
philosophical argumentation. Hence Short and Lewis have, for ‘diagoge,’ the
cognates of ‘trādūco,’ f. transduco. Now, the more emphasis is placed on
justification by elimination of the rival, the greater is the impetus given to
refutation, whether of theses or of people. And perhaps a greater emphasis on a
diagogic procedure, if it could be shown to be justifiable, would have an
eirenic effect. Cf. Aristotle on diagoge, schole, otium. Liddell and Scott
have “διαγωγή,” which they render as “literally carrying across,” -- “τριήρων”
Polyaen.5.2.6, also as “carrying through,” and “hence fig.” “ἡ διὰ πάντων αὐτῶν
δ., “taking a person through a subject by instruction, Pl. Ep.343; so, course
of instruction, lectures, ἐν τῇ ἐνεστώσῃ δ. prob. in Phld. Piet.25; also
passing of life, way or course of life, “δ. βίου” Pl. R.344e: abs., Id.
Tht.177a, etc., way of passing time, amusement, “δ. μετὰ παιδιᾶς” Arist. EN
1127b34, cf. 1177a27; “δ. ἐλευθέριος” Id. Pol.1339b5; διαγωγαὶ τοῦ συζῆν public
pastimes, ib.1280b37, cf. Plu.126b (pl.). also delay, D.C. 57.3. management,
τῶν πραγμάτων δ. dispatch of business, Id.48.5. IV. station for ships, f. l. in
Hdn.4.2.8. And there are other entries to consider: διαγωγάν: διαίρεσιν,
διανομήν, διέλευσιν. Grice knew what he was talking about! Refs.: The main
sources listed under ‘desirability,’ above. There is a specific essay on
‘probability and life.’ Good keywords, too, are epagoge and induction The H. P.
Grice Papers, BANC.
dialogos
– the ‘dia’ means ‘trans-‘, not ‘two.’ Deuterologos δευτερο-λόγος , ὁ, A.second
speaker (though, not really conversationalist – cf. conversari) Teles p.5 H. --
is the exact opposite of monologos, cf. Aeschylus when he called on an Athenian
to play the second ‘fighter’ “deuteron-agonistes.” -- dialogical implicaturum – Grice seldom
uses ‘dialogue.’ It’s always conversational with him. He must have thought that
‘dialogue’ was too Buberian. In Roman, ‘she had a conversation with him’ means
‘she had sex with him.’ “She had a dialogue with him” does not. Classicists are
obsessed with the beginning of Greek theatre: it all started with ‘dialogue.’
It wasn’t like Aeschylus needed a partner. He wrote the parts for BOTH. Was he
reconstructing naturally-occurring Athenian dialogue? Who knows! The *two*-actor rule, which was indeed
preceded by a convention in which only a single actor would appear on stage,
along with the chorus. It was in 471 B. C. that Aeschylus introduces a second
actor, called Cleander. You see, Aeschylus
always cast himself as protagonist in his own plays. For the season of 471 B.
C., the Athenians were surprised when Aeschylus introduced Cleander as his
deuteragonist. “I can now conversationally implicate!” he said to a cheering
crowd! Dialogism -- Bakhtin: m. m., philosopher of dialogism -- and
cultural theorist whose influence is pervasive in a wide range of academic
disciplines from literary hermeneutics
to the epistemology of the human sciences, and cultural theory. He may
legitimately be called a philosophical anthropologist in the venerable
Continental tradition. Because of his seminal work on Rabelais and Dostoevsky’s
poetics, Baden School Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 70 70 his influence has been greatest in
literary hermeneutics. Without question dialogism, or the construal of
dialogue, is the hallmark of Bakhtin’s thought. Dialogue marks the existential
condition of humanity in which the self and the other are asymmetrical but
double-binding. In his words, to exist means to communicate dialogically, and
when the dialogue ends, everything else ends. Unlike Hegelian and Marxian
dialectics but like the Chin. correlative logic of yin and yang, Bakhtin’s
dialogism is infinitely polyphonic, open-ended, and indeterminate, i.e.,
“unfinalizable” to use his term.
Dialogue means that there are neither first nor last words. The past and the
future are interlocked and revolve around the axis of the present. Bakhtin’s
dialogism is paradigmatic in a threefold sense. First, dialogue is never
abstract but embodied. The lived body is the material condition of social existence
as ongoing dialogue. Not only does the word become enfleshed, but dialogue is
also the incorporation of the self and the other. Appropriately, therefore,
Bakhtin’s body politics may be called a Slavic version of Tantrism. Second, the
Rabelaisian carnivalesque that Bakhtin’s dialogism incorporates points to the
“jesterly” politics of resistance and protest against the “priestly”
establishment of officialdom. Third, the most distinguishing characteristic of
Bakhtin’s dialogism is the primacy of the other over the self, with a twofold
consequence: one concerns ethics and the other epistemology. In modern
philosophy, the discovery of “Thou” or the primacy of the other over the self
in asymmetrical reciprocity is credited to Feuerbach. It is hailed as the “Copernican
revolution” of mind, ethics, and social thought. Ethically, Bakhtin’s
dialogism, based on heteronomy, signals the birth of a new philosophy of
responsibility that challenges and transgresses the Anglo- tradition of “rights
talk.” Epistemologically, it lends our welcoming ears to the credence that the
other may be right the attitude that
Gadamer calls the soul of dialogical hermeneutics.
diaphaneity: Grice unique in his
subtlety. Strawson and Wiggins. 'the quality of being freely pervious to light;
transparency', OED. This is a
crucial concept for Grice. He applies it ‘see,’ which which, after joint
endeavours with G. J. Warnock, he was obsessed! Grice considers the ascription,
“Warnock sees that it is raining.” And then he adds, “And it is true, I see
that it is raining, too.” What’s the diference. Then comes Strawson. “Strawson,
you see that it is raining, right?” So we have an ascription in the first,
second, and third persons. When it comes to the identification of a sense (like
vision) via experience or qualia, we are at a problem, because ‘see,’ allowing
for what Ryle calls a ‘conversational avowal,’ that nobody has an authority to
distrust, is what Grice calls a ‘diaphanous’ predicate. More formally. That
means that “Grice sees that it is raining,” in terms of experience, cannot
really be expanded except by expanding into WHAT IS that Grice sees, viz. that
it is raining. The same with “communicating that p,” and “meaning that p.”
dictum: Grice was fascinated with these multiple vowel roots:
dictum, deictis. Cf. dictor, and dictivenss. Not necessarily involved with
‘say,’ but with ‘deixis,’ So a dictum is involved in Emissor E drawing a skull,
communicating that there is danger. It is Hare who introduced ‘dictum’ in the
Oxonian philosophical literature in his T. H. Green Essay. Hare distinguishes
between the ‘dictum,’ that the cat is on the mat, from the ‘dictor,’ ‘I state
that the cat is on the mat, yes.’ ‘Cat, on the mat, please.’ Grice often refers
to Hare’s play with words, which he obviously enjoys. In “Epilogue,” Grice
elaborates on the ‘dictum,’ and turns it into ‘dictivitas.’ How does he coin
that word? He starts with Cicero, who has ‘dictivm,’ and creates an abstract
noun to match. Grice needs a concept of a ‘dictum’ ambiguous as it is. Grice
distinguishes between what an Utterer explicitly conveys, e. g. that Strawson
took off his boots and went to bed. Then there’s what Grice implicitly conveys,
to wit: that Strawson took off his boots and went to bed – in that order. Surely
Grice has STATED that Strawson took off his boots and went to bed. Grice has
ASSERTED that Strawson took off his boots and went to bed. But if Grice were to
order Strawson: “Put on your parachute and jump!” the implicatura may differ.
By uttering that utterance, Grice has not asserted or stated anything. So Grice
needs a dummy that will do for indicatives and imperatives. ‘Convey’ usually
does – especially in the modality ‘explicitly’ convey. Because by uttering that
utterance Grice has explicitly conveyed that Strawson is to put on his
parachute and jump. Grice has implicitly conveyd that Strawson is to put on his
parachute and THEN jump, surely.
Griceian
dignitas:
a moral worth or status usually attributed to human persons. Persons are said
to have dignity as well as to express it. Persons are typically thought to have
1 “human dignity” an dichotomy paradox dignity 234 234 intrinsic moral worth, a basic moral
status, or both, which is had equally by all persons; and 2 a “sense of
dignity” an awareness of one’s dignity inclining toward the expression of one’s
dignity and the avoidance of humiliation. Persons can lack a sense of dignity
without consequent loss of their human dignity. In Kant’s influential account
of the equal dignity of all persons, human dignity is grounded in the capacity
for practical rationality, especially the capacity for autonomous
self-legislation under the categorical imperative. Kant holds that dignity
contrasts with price and that there is nothing
not pleasure nor communal welfare nor other good consequences for which it is morally acceptable to
sacrifice human dignity. Kant’s categorical rejection of the use of persons as
mere means suggests a now-common link between the possession of human dignity
and human rights see, e.g., the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. One now widespread discussion of dignity concerns “dying with dignity”
and the right to conditions conducive thereto.
Griceian
dilemma,
a trilemma, tetralemma, monolemma, lemma
– Grice thought that Ryle’s dilemmas
were overrated. Strictly, a ‘dilemma’ is a piece of reasoning or argument or
argument form in which one of the premises is a disjunction, featuring “or.” Constructive
dilemmas take the form ‘If A and B, if C, D, A or C; therefore, B or D’ and are
instances of modus ponendo ponens in the special case where A is C and B is D; A
so-called ‘destructive’ dilemma is of the form ‘If A, B, if C, D, not-B or
not-D; therefore, not-A or not-C’ and it is likewise an instance of modus tollendo tollens
in that special case. A dilemma in which the disjunctive premise is false is
commonly known as a “false” dilemma, which is one of Ryle’s dilemmas: “a
category mistake!”
diminutive: diminished capacity:
explored by Grice in his analysis of legal versus moral right -- a legal
defense to criminal liability that exists in two distinct forms: 1 the mens rea
variant, in which a defendant uses evidence of mental abnormality to cast doubt
on the prosecution’s assertion that, at the time of the crime, the defendant
possessed the mental state criteria, the mens rea, required by the legal
definition of the offense charged; and 2 the partial responsibility variant, in
which a defendant uses evidence of mental abnormality to support a claim that,
even if the defendant’s mental state satisfied the mens rea criteria for the
offense, the defendant’s responsibility for the crime is diminished and thus
the defendant should be convicted of a lesser crime and/or a lesser sentence
should be imposed. The mental abnormality may be produced by mental disorder,
intoxication, trauma, or other causes. The mens rea variant is not a distinct
excuse: a defendant is simply arguing that the prosecution cannot prove the
definitional, mental state criteria for the crime. Partial responsibility is an
excuse, but unlike the similar, complete excuse of legal insanity, partial
responsibility does not produce total acquittal; rather, a defendant’s claim is
for reduced punishment. A defendant may raise either or both variants of
diminished capacity and the insanity defense in the same case. For example, a
common definition of firstdegree murder requires the prosecution to prove that
a defendant intended to kill and did so after premeditation. A defendant
charged with this crime might raise both variants as follows. To deny the
allegation of premeditation, a defendant might claim that the killing occurred
instantaneously in response to a “command hallucination.” If believed, a
defendant cannot be convicted of premeditated homicide, but can be convicted of
the lesser crime of second-degree murder, which typically requires only intent.
And even a defendant who killed intentionally and premeditatedly might claim
partial responsibility because the psychotic mental state rendered the agent’s
reasons for action nonculpably irrational. In this case, either the degree of
crime might be reduced by operation of the partial excuse, rather than by
negation of definitional mens rea, or a defendant might be convicted of
first-degree murder but given a lesser penalty. In the United States the mens
rea variant exists in about half the jurisdictions, although its scope is
usually limited in various ways, primarily to avoid a defendant’s being
acquitted and freed if mental abnormality negated all the definitional mental
state criteria of the crime charged. In English law, the mens rea variant
exists but is limited by the type of evidence usable to support it. No jurisdiction has adopted a distinct,
straightforward partial responsibility variant, but various analogous doctrines
and procedures are widely accepted. For example, partial responsibility grounds
both the doctrine that intentional killing should be reduced from murder to
voluntary manslaughter if a defendant acted “in the heat of passion” upon
legally adequate provocation, and the sentencing judge’s discretion to award a
decreased sentence based on a defendant’s mental abnormality. In addition to
such partial responsibility analogues, England, Wales, and Scotland have
directly adopted the partial responsibility variant, termed “diminished
responsibility,” but it applies only to prosecutions for murder. “Diminished
responsibility” reduces a conviction to a lesser crime, such as manslaughter or
culpable homicide, for behavior that would otherwise constitute murder.
direction
of fit
– referred to by Grice in “Intention and uncertainty,” and symbolized by an
upward arrow and a downward arrow – there are only TWO directions (or senses)
of fit: expressum to ‘re’ and ‘re’ to expressum. The first is indicativus
modus; the second is imperativus modus -- according to his thesis of
aequivocality – the direction of fit is overrated -- a metaphor that derives
from a story in Anscombe’s Intention 7 about a detective who follows a shopper
around town making a list of the things that the shopper buys. As Anscombe
notes, whereas the detective’s list has to match the way the world is each of
the things the shopper buys must be on the detective’s list, the shopper’s list
is such that the world has to fit with it each of the things on the list are
things that he must buy. The metaphor is now standardly used to describe the
difference between kinds of speech act assertions versus commands and mental
states beliefs versus desires. For example, beliefs are said to have the
world-to-mind direction of fit because it is in the nature of beliefs that
their contents are supposed to match the world: false beliefs are to be
abandoned. Desires are said to have the opposite mind-to-world direction of fit
because it is in the nature of desires that the world is supposed to match
their contents. This is so at least to the extent that the role of an
unsatisfied desire that the world be a certain way is to prompt behavior aimed
at making the world that way.
disgrice: In PGRICE,
Kemmerling speaks of disgricing as the opposite of gricing. The first way to
disgrice Kemmerling calls ‘strawsonising.’For Strawson, even the resemblance
(for Grice, equivalence in terms of 'iff' -- cf. his account of what an
syntactically structured non-complete expression) between (G) There
is not a single volume in my uncle’s library which is not by an English
author,’and the negatively existential form (LFG) ~ (Ex)(Ax . ~ Bx)’
is deceptive, ‘It is not the case that there exists an x such that x is a book in Grice’s uncle’s
library and x is written by an
Englishman. FIRST, 'There is not a
single volume in uncle’s library which is not by an English author' -- as normally used, carries the
presupposition -- or entails, for Grice --
(G2) Some (at least one) book is in Grice’s uncle’s library. SECOND, 'There
is not a single volume in Grice’s uncle’s library which is not by an English
author,’ is far from being 'entailed' by (G3e) It is not the case that
there is some (at least one) book in my room. If we give ‘There not a single book in my room which is not by an English
author’ the modernist logical form ‘~
(Ex)(Ax .~ Bx),’ we see that this is ENTAILED
by the briefer, and indeed logicall stronger (in terms of entailments) ~ (Ex)Ax. So when Grice, with a solemn face, utters, ‘There
is not a single foreign volume in my uncle’s library, to reveal later that the library is empty, Grice should expect
his addressee to get some odd feeling. Surely not the feeling of having been
lied to -- or been confronted with an initial false utterance --, because we
have not. Strawson gets the feeling of having been made "the victim of a sort
of communicative outrage." "What you say is outrageous!" This
sounds stronger than it is. An outrage is believed to be an evil deed, offense,
crime; affront, indignity, act not within established or reasonable
limits," of food, drink, dress, speech, etc., from Old French outrage "harm, damage;
insult; criminal behavior; presumption, insolence, overweening" (12c.),
earlier oltrage (11c.),
From Vulgar Latin ‘ultraticum,’
excess," from Latin ultra,
beyond" (from suffixed form of PIE root *al- "beyond"). Etymologically, "the passing beyond
reasonable bounds" in any sense. The meaning narrowed in English toward
violent excesses because of folk etymology from out + rage. Of
injuries to feelings, principles, etc., from outrage, v. outragen, "to go to excess, act
immoderately," from outrage (n.)
or from Old French oultrager.
From 1580s with meaning "do violence to, attack, maltreat."
Related: Outraged; outraging. But Strawson gets the
feeling of having been made "the victim of a sort of communicative
outrage.” When Grice was only trying to tutor him in The Organon. Of
course it is not the case that Grice is explicitly conveying or expressing that
there there is some (at least one) book in his uncle's room. Grice has not said
anything false. Or rather, it is not the case that Grice utters an
utterance which is not alethically or doxastically satisfactory. Yet what Grice
gives Strawson the defeasible, cancellable, license to to assume that
Grice thinks there is at least one book. Unless he goes on to cancel the implicaturum,
Grice may be deemed to be misleading Strawson. What Grice explicitly conveys to
be true (or false) it is necessary (though not sufficient) that there should at
least one volume in his uncle’s library -- It is not the case that my uncle has
a library and in that library all the books are autochthonous to England, i.e.
it is not the case that Grice’s uncle has a library; for starters, it is not
the case that Grice has a literate uncle. Of this SUBTLE, nuantic, or cloudy or
foggy, "slight or delicate degree of difference in expression, feeling,
opinion, etc.," from Fr. nuance "slight difference, shade of colour,” from nuer "to
shade," from nue "cloud," from Gallo-Roman nuba, from
Latin nubes "a
cloud, mist, vapour," sneudh- "fog," source also of
Avestan snaoda "clouds,"
Latin obnubere "to
veil," Welsh nudd "fog," Greek nython, in
Hesychius "dark, dusky") According to Klein, the French usage is a
reference to "the different colours of the clouds,” in reference to color
or tone, "a slight variation in shade; of music, as a French term in
English -- 'sort' is the relation between ‘There is not a volume in my
uncle's library which is not by an English author,’ and ‘My uncle's
library is not empty. RE-ENTER GRICE. Grice suggested that Strawson see such a
fine point such as that, which Grice had the kindness to call an 'implicaturum',
the result of an act of an ‘implicatura’ (they were both attending Kneale’s
seminar on the growth and ungrowth of logic) is irrelevant to the issue of
‘entailment’. It is a 'merely pragmatic’ implicaturum, Grice would say,
bringing forward a couple of distinctions: logical/pragmatic point;
logical/pragmatic inference; entailment/implicaturum; conveying
explicitly/conveying implicitly; stating/implicating; asserting/implying; what
an utterer means/what the expression 'means' -- but cf. Nowell-Smith, who left
Oxford after being overwhelmed by Grice, "this is how the rules of
etiquette inform the rules of logic -- on the 'rule' of relevance in
"Ethics," 1955. If to call such a point, as Grice does, as "irrelevant
to logic" is vacuous in that it may be interpreted as saying that that
such a fine foggy point is not considered in a modernist formal system of
first-order predicate calculus with identity, this Strawson wishes not to
dispute, but to emphasise. Call it his battle cry! But to 'logic' as concerned
with this or that relation between this or that general class of statement
occurring in ordinary use, and the attending general condition under which this
or that statement is correctly called 'true' or 'false,' this fine foggy nice
point would hardly be irrelevant. GRICE'S FORMALIST (MODERNIST)
INTERPRETATION. Some 'pragmatic' consideration, or assumption, or expectation,
a desideratum of conversational conduct obviously underlies and in fact
'explains' the implicaturum, without having to change the ‘sense’ of
Aristotle’s syllogistics in terms of the logical forms of A, E, I, and O. If we
abide by an imperative of conversational helpfulness, enjoining the maximally
giving and receiving of information and the influencing and being influenced by
others in the institution of a decisions, the sub-imperative follows to the
effect, ‘Thou shalt NOT make a weak move compared to the stronger one that thou
canst truthfully make, and with equal or greater economy of means.’ Assume the
form ‘There is not a single … which is not . . .,’ or ‘It is not the case
that ... there is some (at least one) x that ... is not ... is introduced
in ‘ordinary’ language with the same SENSE as the expression in the
‘ideal’ language, ~(Ex)(Ax and ~Bx). Then prohibition inhibits the utterance of
the form where the utterer can truly and truthfully simply convey
explicitly ‘There is not a single ..., i. e. ~(Ex)(Fx). It is
defeasible prohibition which tends to confer on the overprolixic form ('it is
not the case that ... there is some (at least one) x that is not ...') just
that kind of an implicaturum which Strawson identifies. But having
detected a nuance in a conversational phenomenon is not the same thing as
rushing ahead to try to explain it BEFORE exploring in some detail what kind of
a nuance it is. The mistake is often commited by Austin, too (in "Other Minds,"
and "A Plea for Excuses"), and by Hart (on 'carefully'), and by Hare
(on "good"), and by Strawson on 'true,' (Analysis), ‘the,’ and 'if --
just to restrict to the play group. Grice tries to respond to anti-sense-datum
in "That pillar box seems red to me,” but Strawson was not listening. The overprolixic form in the ‘ordinary’
language, ‘It is not the case that there is some (at least one x) such that ...
x is not ...’ would tend, if it does not remain otiose, to develop or generate
just that baffling effect in one's addressee ('outrage!') that Strawson identifies,
as opposed to the formal-device in the ‘ideal’ language with which the the
‘ordinary’ language counterpart is co-related. What weakens our resistance
to the negatively existential analysis in this case more than in the case of
the corresponding "All '-sentence is the powerful attraction of the
negative opening phrase There is not …'. To avoid misunderstanding
one may add a point about the neo-traditionalist interpretation of the forms of
the traditional Aristotelian system. Strawson is not claiming that it
faithfully represents this or that intention of the principal exponent of the
Square of Opposition. Appuleius, who knows, was perhaps, more interested in
formulating this or that theorem governing this or that logical relation of
this or that more imposing general statement than this or that everyday general
statement that Strawson considers. Appuleius, who knows, might have
been interested, e. g., in the logical powers of this or that
generalisation, or this or that sentence which approximates more closely to the
desired conditions that if its utterance by anyone, at any time, at any place,
results in a true statement, so does its utterance by anyone else, at any other
time, at any other place. How far the account by the neo-traditionalist
of this or that general sentence of 'ordinary' langauge is adequate for every
generalization may well be under debate. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “In defence of
Appuleius,” BANC.
The explicaturum/implicaturum/disimplicaturum triad: Grice: “Strictly, it’s a dyad, since disimplicatum
is a derivative of one member of the dyad, the implicatum – so that the
opposition is binary (ex/in) with ‘dis-‘ as applied to the im-, cf.
disexplicaturum – (the annulation of an explicaturum). “We should not conclude
from this that an implication of the existence of thing said to be seen is NOT
part of the conventional meaning of ‘see’ nor even (as some philosophers have
done) that there is one sense of ‘see’ which lacks this implication!” (WoW:44).
If Oxonians are obsessed with ‘implication,’ do they NEED ‘disimplicaturum’?
Grice doesn’t think so! But sometimes you have to use it to correct a mistake.
Grice does not give names, but he says he has heard a philosopher claim that
there are two SENSES of ‘see,’ one which what one sees exists, and one in which
it doesn’t! It would be good to trace that! It relates, in any case to
‘remembers,’but not quite, and to ‘know.’ But not quite. The issue of ‘see’ is
not that central, since Grice realizes that it is just a modality of
perception, even if crucial. He coined ‘visum’ with Warnock to play with the
idea of ‘what is seen’ NOT being existent.
On another occasion, when he cannot name a ridiculous philosopher, he
invents him: “A philosopher will not be given much credit if he comes with an
account of the indefinite ‘one’ as having three senses: one proximate to the
emissor (“I broke a finger”), one distant (“He’s meeting a woman”) and one
where the link is not specified (“A flower”). he target is of course Davidson
having the cheek to quote Grice’s Henriette Herz Trust lecture for the BA!
Lewis and Short have ‘intendere’ under ‘in-tendo,’ which they render as ‘to
stretch out or forth, extend, also to turn ones attention to, exert one’s self
for, to purpose, endeavour,” and finaly as “intend”! “pergin, sceleste,
intendere hanc arguere?” Plaut. Mil. 2, 4, 27 Grices tends towards
claiming that you cannot extend what you dont intend. In the James lectures,
Grice mentions the use of is to mean seem (The tie is red in this light), and
see to mean hallucinate. Denying Existence: The Logic, Epistemology and Pragmatics of
...books.google.com › books ... then it seems unidiomatic if not ungrammatical
to speak of hallucinations as ... that fighting people and 156 APPEARING
UNREALS 4 Two Senses of "See"? A. Chakrabarti - 1997 - Language Arts
& Disciplines The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism,
Morality, and ...books.google.com › books sight, say sense-data; others will
then say that there are two senses of 'see'. ... wrong because I am dreaming or
hallucinating them, which of course could ... Stanley Cavell - 1999 -
Philosophy Wittgenstein and Perception - Page 37 - Google Books
Resultbooks.google.com › books For example, Gilbert Harman characterises the
two senses of see as follows: see† = 'the ... which is common to genuine cases
of seeing and to hallucinations. Michael Campbell, Michael O'Sullivan - 2015 -
Philosophy The Alleged Ambiguity of'See'www.jstor.org › stable
including dreams, hallucinations and the perception of physical objects. ...
existence of at least two senses of ' see' were his adherence to the doctrine
that 'see' ... by AR White - 1963 - Cited by 3 - Related articles
Seeing and Naming - jstorwww.jstor.org › stable there are or aren't two
senses of 'see'. If there are, I'm speaking of ... The third kind of case is
illustrated by Macbeth's dagger hallucination, at least if we assume ... by RJ
Hall - 1977 - Cited by 3 - Related articles Philosophy at
LaGuardia Community Collegewww.laguardia.edu › Philosophy › GADFLY-2011 PDF
Lastly, I will critically discuss Ayer's two senses of 'see', ... (e.g.,
hallucinations); it thus seems correct to say that ... Hallucinations are
hallucinations. There are. Talking about seeing: An examination of
some aspects of the ...etd.ohiolink.edu › ... I propose a distinction between
delusions and hallucinations,'and argue ... say that there are two senses of
.'see* in ordinary language or not, he does, as I will ... by KA Emmett - 1974
- Related articles Wittgenstein and
Perceptionciteseerx.ist.psu.edu › viewdoc › download PDF 2 Two senses of 'see'.
33 ... may see things that are not there, for example in hallucinations. ...
And so, hallucinations are not genuine perceptual experiences. by Y Arahata -
Related articles Allen Blur - University of
Yorkwww-users.york.ac.uk › Publications_files PDF of subjectively
indistinguishable hallucination (e.g. Crane 2006). ... and material objects of
sight, and correlatively for a distinction between two senses of 'see',. by K
Allen - Related articles Austin and sense-data - UBC Library Open
Collectionsopen.library.ubc.ca › ... › UBC Theses and Dissertations Sep 15,
2011 - (5) Illusions and Hallucinations It is not enough to reject Austin's way
of ... I will not deal with Austin and Ayer on "two senses of 'see'"
because I ... by DD Todd - 1967 - Cited by 1 - Related articles. Godfrey
Vesey (1965, p. 73) deposes, "if a person sees something at all it must
look like something to him, even if it only looks like 'somebody doing
something.' With Davidson, Grice was more cavalier, because he could
blame it on a different ‘New-World’ dialect or idiolect, about ‘intend.’ When
Grice uses ‘disimplicaturum’ to apply to ‘cream in coffee’ that is a bit
tangential – and refers more generally to his theory of communication. What
would the rationale of disimplicaturum be? In this case, if the emissee
realizes the obvious category mistake (“She’s not the cream in your coffee”)
there may be a need to disimplicate explicitly. To consider. There is an
example that he gives that compares with ‘see’ and it is even more
philosophical but he doesn’t give examples: to use ‘is’ when one means ‘seem’
(the tie example). The reductive
analyses of being and seeing hold. We have here two cases of loose use (or disimplicaturum).
Same now with his example in “Intention and Uncertainty” (henceforth,
“Uncertainty”): Smith intends to climb Mt. Everest + [common-ground status:
this is difficult]. Grices response to Davidsons pretty unfair use of Grices
notion of conversational implicaturum in Davidsons analysis of intention caught
a lot of interest. Pears loved Grices reply. Implicaturum here is out of the
question ‒ disimplicaturum may not. Grice just saw that his theory of
conversation is too social to be true when applied to intending. The doxastic
condition is one of the entailments in an ascription of an intending. It cannot
be cancelled as an implicaturum can. If it can be cancelled, it is best seen as
a disimplicaturum, or a loose use by an utterer meaning less than what he says
or explicitly conveys to more careful conversants. Grice and Davidson were
members of The Grice and Davidson Mutual Admiration Society. Davidson, not
being Oxonian, was perhaps not acquainted with Grices polemics at Oxford with
Hart and Hampshire (where Grice sided with Pears, rather). Grice and Pears
hold a minimalist approach to intending. On the other hand, Davidson makes
what Grice sees as the same mistake again of building certainty into the
concept. Grice finds that to apply the idea of a conversational implicaturum
at this point is too social to be true. Rather, Grice prefers to coin the
conversational disimplicaturum: Marmaduke Bloggs intends to climb Mt
Everest on hands and knees. The utterance above, if merely reporting what
Bloggs thinks, may involve a loose use of intends. The certainty on the
agents part on the success of his enterprise is thus cast with
doubt. Davidson was claiming that the agents belief in the probability of
the object of the agents intention was a mere conversational implicaturum on
the utterers part. Grice responds that the ascription of such a belief is
an entailment of a strict use of intend, even if, in cases where the utterer
aims at a conversational disimplicaturum, it can be dropped. The
addressee will still regard the utterer as abiding by the principle of
conversational helpfulness. Pears was especially interested in the
Davidson-Grice polemic on intending, disimplicaturum, disimplicaturum. Strictly,
a section of his reply to Davidson. If Grices claim to fame is implicaturum, he
finds disimplicaturum an intriguing notion to capture those occasions when an
utterer means LESS than he says. His examples include: a loose use of intending
(without the entailment of the doxastic condition), the uses of see in
Shakespeareian contexts (Macbeth saw Banquo, Hamlet saw his father on the
ramparts of Elsinore) and the use of is to mean seems (That tie is blue under
this light, but green otherwise, when both conversants know that a change of
colour is out of the question. He plays with Youre the cream in my coffee being
an utterance where the disimplicaturum (i.e. entailment dropping) is total. Disimplicaturum
does not appeal to a new principle of conversational rationality. It is
perfectly accountable by the principle of conversational helpfulness, in
particular, the desideratum of conversational candour. In everyday explanation we exploit, as Grice notes,
an immense richness in the family of expressions that might be thought of as
the wanting family. This wanting family includes expressions like want, desire,
would like to, is eager to, is anxious to, would mind not…, the idea of appeals to me, is thinking of, etc. As Grice
remarks, The likeness and differences within this wanting family demand careful
attention. In commenting on Davidsons treatment of wanting in
Intending, Grice notes: It seems to Grice that the picture of the soul
suggested by Davidsons treatment of wanting is remarkably tranquil and, one
might almost say, computerized. It is the picture of an ideally decorous board
meeting, at which the various heads of sections advance, from the standpoint of
their particular provinces, the case for or against some proposed course of
action. In the end the chairman passes judgement, effective for action;
normally judiciously, though sometimes he is for one reason or another
over-impressed with the presentation made by some particular member. Grices
soul doesnt seem to him, a lot of the time, to be like that at all. It is more
like a particularly unpleasant department meeting, in which some members shout,
wont listen, and suborn other members to lie on their behalf; while the
chairman, who is often himself under suspicion of cheating, endeavours to
impose some kind of order; frequently to no effect, since sometimes the meeting
breaks up in disorder, sometimes, though it appears to end comfortably, in
reality all sorts of enduring lesions are set up, and sometimes, whatever the
outcome of the meeting, individual members go off and do things unilaterally.
Could it be that Davidson, of the New World, and Grice, of the Old World, have
different idiolects regarding intend? Could well be! It is said that the New
World is prone to hyperbole, so perhaps in Grices more cautious use, intend is
restricted to the conditions HE wants it to restrict it too! Odd that for all
the generosity he displays in Post-war Oxford philosophy (Surely I can help you
analyse you concept of this or that, even if my use of the corresponding
expression does not agree with yours), he goes to attack Davidson, and just for
trying to be nice and apply the conversational implicaturum to intend! Genial
Grice! It is natural Davidson, with his naturalistic tendencies, would like to
see intending as merely invoking in a weak fashion the idea of a strong
psychological state as belief. And its natural that Grice hated that! Refs.:
The source is Grice’s comment on Davidson on intending. The H. P. Grice Papers,
BANC.
disjunctum: Strangely enough
Ariskant thought disjunctum, but not conjunctum a categorial related to the
category of ‘community’!Aulus Gellius (The Attic Nights, XVI, 8) tells us about
this disjunction: “There also is ■ another type of a^twpa which the Greeks call
and we call disjunctum, disjunctive sentence. Gellius notes that ‘or’ is by
default ‘inclusive’: where one or several propositions may be simultaneously
true, without ex- cluding one another, although they may also all be false.
Gellius expands on the non-default reading of exclusive disjunction: pleasure
is either good or bad or it is neither good nor bad (“Aut malum est voluplas,
aut bonum, aul neque bonum, neque malum est”). All the elements of the
exclusive disjunctive exclude one another, and their contradictory elements,
Gr. avTtxs'-p.sva, are incompatible with one another”. “Ex omnibus quae
disjunguntiir, unum esse verum debet, falsa cetera.”Grice lists ‘or’ as the
second binary functor in his response to Strawson. But both Grice and Strawson
agreed that the Oxonian expert on ‘or’ is Wood. Mitchell is good, too, though. The
relations between “v” and “or” (or “either ... or …”) are, on the whole, less
intimate than those between “.” and “and,” but less distant than those between
“D” and “if.” Let us speak of a statement made by coupling two clauses by “or” as
an alternative statement ; and let us speak of the first and second alternatesof
such a statement, on analogy with our talk of the antecedent and consequent of
a hypothetical statement. At a bus-stop, someone might say: “Either we catch
this bus or we shall have to walk all the way home.” He might equally well have
said “If we don't catch this bus, we shall have to walk all the way home.” It
will be seen that the antecedent of the hypothetical statement he might have
made is the negation of the first alternate of the alternative statement he did
make. Obviously, we should not regard our catching the bus as a sufficient
condition of the 'truth' of either statement; if it turns out that the bus we
caught was not the last one, we should say that the man who had made the
statement had been wrong. The truth of one of the alternates is no more a
sufficient condition of the truth of the alternative statement than the falsity
of the antecedent is a sufficient condition of the truth of the hypothetical
statement. And since 'p"Dpyq' (and, equally, * q"3p v q ') is a law
of the truth-functional system, this fact sufficiently shows a difference
between at least one standard use of “or” and the meaning given to “v.” Now in
all, or almost all, the cases where we are prepared to say something of the
form “p or q,” we are also prepared to say something of the form 4 if not-p,
then q \ And this fact may us to exaggerate the difference between “v” and “or”
to think that, since in some cases, the fulfilment of one alternate is not a
sufficient condition of the truth of the alternative statement of which It is
an alternate, the fulfilment of one alternate is a sufficient condition of the
truth of an alternative statement. And this is certainly an exaggeration. If
someone says ; “Either it was John or it was Robert but I couldn't tell which,”
we are satisfied of the truth of the alternative statement if either of the
alternates turns out to be true; and we say that the speaker was wrong only if
neither turns out to be true. Here we seem to have a puzzle ; for we seem to be
saying that * Either it was John or it was Robert ' entails 4 If it wasn't
John, it was Robert * and, at the same time, that ‘It was John’ entails the
former, but not the latter. What we are suffering from here is perhaps a
crudity in our notion of entailraent, a difficulty In applying this too
undifferentiated concept to the facts of speech ; or, if we prefer it, an
ambiguity in the notion of a sufficient condition. The statement that it was John
entails the statement that it was either John or Robert in the sense thai it
confirms it; when It turns out to have been John, the man who said that either
It was John or it was Robert is shown to have been right. But the first
statement does not entail the second in the sense that the step ‘It was John,
so it was either John or Robert’ is a logically proper step, unless the person saying
this means by it simply that the alternative statement made previously was
correct, i.e., 'it was one of the two '. For the alternative statement carries
the implication of the speaker's uncertainty as to which of the two it was, and
this implication is inconsistent with the assertion that it was John. So in
this sense of * sufficient condition ', the statement that it was John is no
more a sufficient condition of (no more entails) the statement that it was
either John or Robert than it is a sufficient condition of (entails) the
statement that if it wasn't John, it was Robert. The further resemblance, which
we have already noticed, between the alternative statement and the hypothetical
statement, is that whatever knowledge or experience renders it reasonable to
assert the alternative statement, also renders it reasonable to make the
statement that (under the condition that it wasn't John) it was Robert. But we
are less happy about saying that the hypothetical statement is confirmed by the
discovery that it was John, than we are about saying that the alternative
statement is confirmed by this discovery. For we are inclined to say that the
question of confirmation of the hypothetical statement (as opposed to the
question of its reasonableness or acceptability) arises only if the condition
(that it wasn't John) turns out to be fulfilled. This shows an asymmetry, as
regards confirmation, though not as regards acceptability, between 4 if not p,
then q ' and * if not qy then p ' which is not mirrored in the forms ‘either p
or q’ and ‘either q or p.’ This asymmetry is ignored in the rule that * if not
p, then q ' and ‘if not q, then p’ are logically equivalent, for this rule
regards acceptability rather than confirmation. And rightly. For we may often
discuss the l truth ' of a subjunctive conditional, where the possibility of
confirmation is suggested by the form of words employed to be not envisaged. It
is a not unrelated difference between * if ' sentences and ‘or’ sentences that
whereas, whenever we use one of the latter, we should also be prepared to use
one of the former, the converse does not hold. The cases in which it does not
generally hold are those of subjunctive conditionals. There is no ‘or’ sentence
which would serve as a paraphrase of ‘If the Germans had invaded England in
1940, they would have won the war’ as this sentence would most commonly be
used. And this is connected with the fact that c either . . . or . . .' is
associated with situations involving choice or decision. 4 Either of these
roads leads to Oxford ' does not mean the same as ' Either this road leads to
Oxford or that road does’ ; but both confront us with the necessity of making a
choice. This brings us to a feature of * or ' which, unlike those so far
discussed, is commonly mentioned in discussion of its relation to * v ' ; the
fact, namely, that in certain verbal contexts, ‘either … or …’ plainly carries
the implication ‘and not both . . . and . . .', whereas in other contexts, it
does not. These are sometimes spoken of as, respectively, the exclusive and
inclusive senses of ‘or;’ and, plainly, if we are to identify 4 v’ with either,
it must be the latter. The reason why, unlike others, this feature of the
ordinary use of “or” is commonly mentioned, is that the difference can readily
be accommodated (1 Cf. footnote to p. 86.In the symbolism of the
truth-functional system: It is the difference between “(p y q) .~ (p . q)”
(exclusive sense) and “p v q” (inclusive sense). “Or,” like “and,” is commonly
used to join words and phrases as well as clauses. The 4 mutuality difficulties
attending the general expansion of 4 x and y are/ 5 into * x is /and y is/' do
not attend the expansion of 4 x or y isf into c r Is/or y is/ ? (This is not to
say that the expansion can always correctly be made. We may call “v” the
disjunctive sign and, being warned against taking the reading too seriously,
may read it as ‘or.' While he never approached the topic separately, it’s easy
to find remarks about disjunction in his oeuvre. A veritable genealogy of
disjunction can be traced along Griceian lines. DISJUNCTUM -- disjunction
elimination. 1 The argument form ‘A or B, if A then C, if B then C; therefore,
C’ and arguments of this form. 2 The rule of inference that permits one to
infer C from a disjunction together with derivations of C from each of the
disjuncts separately. This is also known as the rule of disjunctive elimination
or V-elimination. disjunction
introduction. 1 The argument form ‘A or B; therefore, A or B’ and arguments of
this form. 2 The rule of inference that permits one to infer a disjunction from
either of its disjuncts. This is also known as the rule of addition or
Vintroduction. . disjunctive
proposition, a proposition whose main propositional operator main connective is
the disjunction operator, i.e., the logical operator that represents ‘and/or’.
Thus, ‘P-and/orQ-and-R’ is not a disjunctive proposition because its main
connective is the conjunction operation, but ‘P-and/or-Q-and-R’ is disjunctive.
Refs.: Grice uses an illustration involving ‘or’ in the ‘implication’ excursus
in “Causal Theory.” But the systematic account comes from WoW, especially essay
4.
dispositum. Grice: “The
–positum is a very formative Roman expression: there’s the suppositum, the
praepositum, and the dispositum. All very apposite!” -- H. P. Grice,
“Disposition and intention” – Grice inspired D. F. Pears on this, as they tried
to refute Austin’s rather dogmatic views in ‘ifs’ and ‘cans’ – where the ‘can’
relates to the disposition, and the ‘if’ to the conditional analysis for it.
Grice’s phrase is “if I can”. “I intend to climb Mt Everest on hands and
knees,” Marmaduke Bloggs says, “if a can.” A disposition, more generally is,
any tendency of an object or system to act or react in characteristic ways in
certain situations. Fragility, solubility, and radioactivity, and
intentionality, are typical dispositions. And so are generosity and
irritability. For Ryle’s brand of analytic behaviorism, functionalism, and some
forms of materialism, an event of the soul, such as the occurrence of an idea,
and states such as a belief, a will, or an intention, is also a disposition. A hypothetical or
conditional statement is alleged to be ‘implicated’ by dispositional claims.
What’s worse, this conditional is alleged to capture the basic meaning of the
ascription of a state of the soul. The glass would shatter if suitably struck.
Left undisturbed, a radium atom will probably decay in a certain time. An
ascription of a disposition is taken as subjunctive rather than material
conditionals to avoid problems like having to count as soluble anything not
immersed in water. The characteristic mode of action or reaction shattering, decaying, etc. is termed the disposition’s manifestation or
display. But it need not be observable. Fragility is a regular or universal
disposition. A suitably struck glass invariably shatters. Radio-activity on the
other hand is alleged to be a variable or probabilistic disposition. Radium may
(but then again may not) decay in a certain situation. A dispositions may be
what Grice calls “multi-track,” i. e. multiply
manifested, rather than “single-track,” or singly manifested. Hardness or
elasticity may have different manifestations in different situations. In his
very controversial (and only famous essay), “The Concept of Mind,” Ryle, who
held, no less, the chair of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford, argues – just to
provoke -- that there is nothing more to a dispositional claim than its
associated conditional. A dispositional property is not an occurrent property.
To possess a dispositional property is not to undergo any episode or
occurrence, or to be in a particular state. Grice surely refuted this when he
claims that the soul is in this or that a state. Consider reasoning. The soul
is in state premise; then the soul is in state conclusion. The episode or
occurrence is an event, when the state of the premise causes the state of the
conclusion. Coupled with a ‘positivist’ (or ultra-physicalist,
ultra-empiricist, and ultra-naturalist) rejection of any unobservable, and a
conception of an alleged episode or state of the soul as a dispositios, this
supports the view of behaviorism that such alleged episode or state is nothing
but a disposition TO observable behaviour – if Grice intends to climb Mt.
Everest on hands and knees if he can, there is no ascription without the
behaviour that manifests it – the ascription is meant to EXPLAIN (or explicate,
or provide the cause) for the behaviour. Grice reached this ‘functionalist’
approach later in his career, and presented it with full fanfare in “Method in
philosophoical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre.” By contrast, realism
holds that dispositional talk is also about an actual or occurrent property or a
state, possibly unknown or unobservable – the ‘black box’ of the functionalist,
a function from sensory input to behavioural output. In particular, it is about
the bases of dispositions in intrinsic properties or states. Thus, fragility is
based in molecular structure, radioactivity in nuclear structure. A
disposition’s basis is viewed as at least partly the cause of its manifestation
in behaviour. Some philosophers, for fear of an infinite regress, hold that the
basis is categorical, not dispositional D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory
of Mind, 8. Others, notably Popper, Madden, and Harre (Causal powers) hold that
every property is dispositional. Grice’s essay has now historical interest –
but showed the relevance of these topics among two tightly closed groups in
post-war Oxford: the dispositionalists led by Ryle, and the
anti-dispositionalists, a one-member group led by Grice. Refs.: Grice,
“Intention and dispositions.”
distributum: distributio -- undistributed middle: a logical
fallacy in traditional syllogistic logic, resulting from the violation of the
rule that the middle term (the term that appears twice in premises) must be
distributed at least once in the premises. Any syllogism that commits this
error is invalid. Consider “All philosophers are persons,” and “Some persons
are bad.” No conclusion follows from these two premises because “persons” in
the first premise is the predicate of an affirmative proposition, and in the
second is the subject of a particular proposition. Neither of them is
distributed. “If in a syllogism the middle term is distributed in neither
premise, we are said to have a fallacy of undistributed middle.” Keynes, Formal
Logic. DISTRIBUTUM -- distribution, the property of standing for every
individual designated by a term. The Latin term distributio originated in the
twelfth century; it was applied to terms as part of a theory of reference, and
it may have simply indicated the property of a term prefixed by a universal
quantifier. The term ‘dog’ in ‘Every dog has his day’ is distributed, because
it supposedly refers to every dog. In contrast, the same term in ‘A dog bit the
mailman’ is not distributed because it refers to only one dog. In time, the idea
of distribution came to be used only as a heuristic device for determining the
validity of categorical syllogisms: 1 every term that is distributed in a
premise must be distributed in the conclusion; 2 the middle term must be
distributed at least once. Most explanations of distribution in logic textbooks
are perfunctory; and it is stipulated that the subject terms of universal
propositions and the predicate terms of negative propositions are distributed.
This is intuitive for A-propositions, e.g., ‘All humans are mortal’; the
property of being mortal is distributed over each human. The idea of
distribution is not intuitive for, say, the predicate term of O-propositions.
According to the doctrine, the sentence ‘Some humans are not selfish’ says in
effect that if all the selfish things are compared with some select human one
that is not selfish, the relation of identity does not hold between that human
and any of the selfish things. Notice that the idea of distribution is not
mentioned in this explanation. The idea of distribution is currently
disreputable, mostly because of the criticisms of Geach in Reference and
Generality 8 and its irrelevance to standard semantic theories. The related
term ‘distributively’ means ‘in a manner designating every item in a group
individually’, and is used in contrast with ‘collectively’. The sentence ‘The
rocks weighed 100 pounds’ is ambiguous. If ‘rocks’ is taken distributively,
then the sentence means that each rock weighed 100 pounds. If ‘rocks’ is taken
collectively, then the sentence means that the total weight of the rocks was
100 pounds. distributive laws, the
logical principles A 8 B 7 C S A 8 B 7 A 7 C and A 7 B 8 C S A 7 B 8 A 7 C.
Conjunction is thus said to distribute over disjunction and disjunction over
conjunction.
ditto: Or Strawson’s big mistake. Strawson quite didn’t
understand what “Analysis” was for, and submits this essay on the
perlocutionary effects of ‘true.’ Grice comes to the resuce of veritable
analysis. cf. verum. Grice disliked Strawson’s ditto theory in Analysis of
‘true’ as admittive performatory. 1620s, "in the month of the same
name," Tuscan dialectal ditto "(in) the said (month or year),"
literary Italian detto, past participle of dire "to say," from Latin
dicere "speak, tell, say" (from PIE root *deik- "to show,"
also "pronounce solemnly"). Italian used the word to avoid
repetition of month names in a series of dates, and in this sense it was picked
up in English. Its generalized meaning of "the aforesaid, the same thing,
same as above" is attested in English by 1670s. In early 19c. a suit of
men's clothes of the same color and material through was ditto or dittoes
(1755). Dittohead, self-description of followers of U.S. radio personality Rush
Limbaugh, attested by 1995. dittoship is from 1869.
dodgson: c. l. – Grice quotes Carroll often. Cabbages and
kings – Achilles and the Tortoise – Humpty Dumpty and his Deutero-Esperanto -- Carroll,
Lewis, pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson 183298, English writer and
mathematician. The eldest son of a large clerical family, he was educated at
Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his
uneventful life, as mathematical lecturer until 1 and curator of the senior
commonroom. His mathematical writings under his own name are more numerous than
important. He was, however, the only Oxonian of his day to contribute to
symbolic logic, and is remembered for his syllogistic diagrams, for his methods
for constructing and solving elaborate sorites problems, for his early interest
in logical paradoxes, and for the many amusing examples that continue to
reappear in modern textbooks. Fame descended upon him almost by accident, as the
author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 1865, Through the Looking Glass
1872, The Hunting of the Snark 1876, and Sylvie and Bruno 9 93; saving the
last, the only children’s books to bring no blush of embarrassment to an adult
reader’s cheek. Dodgson took deacon’s orders in 1861, and though pastorally
inactive, was in many ways an archetype of the prim Victorian clergyman. His
religious opinions were carefully thought out, but not of great philosophic
interest. The Oxford movement passed him by; he worried about sin though
rejecting the doctrine of eternal punishment, abhorred profanity, and fussed
over Sunday observance, but was oddly tolerant of theatergoing, a lifelong
habit of his own. Apart from the sentimental messages later inserted in them,
the Alice books and Snark are blessedly devoid of religious or moral concern.
Full of rudeness, aggression, and quarrelsome, if fallacious, argument, they
have, on the other hand, a natural attraction for philosophers, who pillage
Carneades Carroll, Lewis 119 119 them
freely for illustrations. Humpty-Dumpty, the various Kings and Queens, the Mad
Hatter, the Caterpillar, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Unicorn, the
Tweedle brothers, the Bellman, the Baker, and the Snark make fleeting
appearances in the s of Russell, Moore, Broad, Quine, Nagel, Austin, Ayer,
Ryle, Blanshard, and even Vitters an unlikely admirer of the Mock Turtle. The
first such allusion to the March Hare is in Venn’s Symbolic Logic 1. The usual
reasons for quotation are to make some point about meaning, stipulative
definition, the logic of negation, time reversal, dream consciousness, the
reification of fictions and nonentities, or the absurdities that arise from
taking “ordinary language” too literally. For exponents of word processing, the
effect of running Jabberwocky through a spell-checker is to extinguish all hope
for the future of Artificial Intelligence. Though himself no philosopher,
Carroll’s unique sense of philosophic humor keeps him and his illustrator, Sir
John Tenniel effortlessly alive in the modern age. Alice has been tr. into
seventy-five languages; new editions and critical studies appear every year;
imitations, parodies, cartoons, quotations, and ephemera proliferate beyond
number; and Carroll societies flourish in several countries, notably Britain
and the United States. Refs.: Sutherland, “Grice, Dodgson, and Carroll. The
Carrolian, the journal of the Lewis Carroll Society – Jabberwocky: the
newsletter of the Lewis Carroll Society. A. M. Ghersi, “Turtles and mock-turtles,”
from “Correspondence with Derek Foster.” Alice’s adventures in Griceland.
dominium -- domain – used by Grice in his treatment of
Extensionalism -- of a science, the class of individuals that constitute its
subject matter. Zoology, number theory, and plane geometry have as their
respective domains the class of animals, the class of natural numbers, and the
class of plane figures. In Posterior Analytics 76b10, Aristotle observes that
each science presupposes its domain, its basic concepts, and its basic
principles. In modern formalizations of a science using a standard firstorder
formal language, the domain of the science is often, but not always, taken as
the universe of the intended interpretation or intended model, i.e. as the
range of values of the individual variables.
donkey – quantification – considered by Grice -- sentences,
sentences exemplified by ‘Every man who owns a donkey beats it’, ‘If a man owns
a donkey, he beats it’, and similar forms (“Every nice girl loves a sailor”),
which have posed logical puzzles since medieval times but were noted more
recently by Geach. At issue is the logical form of such sentences specifically, the correct construal of the
pronoun ‘it’ and the indefinite noun phrase ‘a donkey’. Translations into
predicate logic by the usual strategy of rendering the indefinite as
existential quantification and the pronoun as a bound variable cf. ‘John owns a
donkey and beats it’ P Dx x is a donkey & John owns x & John beats x
are either ill-formed or have the wrong truth conditions. With a universal
quantifier, the logical form carries the controversial implication that every
donkey-owning man beats every donkey he owns. Efforts to resolve these issues
have spawned much significant research in logic and linguistic semantics.
dossier: Grice is not clear about the status of this – but
some philosophers have been too mentalistic. How would a genitorial programme
proceed. Is there a dossier in a handwave by which the emissor communicates
that he knows the route or that he is about to leave his emissee. It does not
seem so, because the handwave is unstructured. Unlike “Fido is shaggy.” In the
case of “Fido is shaggy,” there must be some OVERLAP between the emissor’s soul
and the emissee’s soul – in terms of dossier. So perhaps there is overlap in
the handwave. There must be an overlap as to WHICH route he means. By making
the handwave the emissor communicates that HE, the emissor, subject IS (copula)
followed by predicate “knower of the route.” So here we have a definite ‘the
route.’ Which route? To heaven, to hell. Cf. The scots ‘high road,’ ‘low road.’
To Loch Lomond. If there is not this minimal common ground nothing can be
communicated. In the alternative meaning, “I (subject) am (copula) about to
leave you – where again there must be an overlap in the identification of the
denotata of the pronouns. In the case of Blackburn’s skull or the arrow at the
fork of a road, the common ground is instituted in situu in the one-off
predicament, and there still must be some overlap of dossier. In its most
technical usage, Grice wants to demystify Donnellan’s identificatory versus
non-identificatory uses of ‘the,’ as unnecessary implications to Russell’s
otherwise neat account. The topic interested Strawson (“Principle of assumption
of ignorance, knowledge and relevance”) and Urmson’s principle of aptitude. Grice’s
favourite vacuous name is ‘Bellerophon.’ ‘Vacuous names’ is an essay
commissioned by Davison and Hintikka for Words and objections: essays on the
work of W. V. Quine (henceforth, W and O) for Reidel, Dordrecht. “W and O” had
appeared (without Grices contribution) as a special issue of Synthese. Grices
contribution, along with Quines Reply to Grice, appeared only in the reprint of
that special issue for Reidel in Dordrecht. Grice cites from various
philosophers (and logicians ‒ this was the time when logic was starting to
be taught outside philosophy departments, or sub-faculties), such as Mitchell,
Myro, Mates, Donnellan, Strawson, Grice was particularly
proud to be able to quote Mates by mouth or book. Grice takes the
opportunity, in his tribute to Quine, to introduce one of two of his
syntactical devices to allow for conversational implicatura to be given maximal
scope. The device in Vacuous Namess is a subscription device to indicate
the ordering of introduction of this or that operation. Grice wants to
give room for utterances of a special existential kind be deemed
rational/reasonable, provided the principle of conversational helfpulness is
thought of by the addressee to be followed by the utterer. Someone isnt
attending the party organised by the Merseyside Geographical Society. That
is Marmaduke Bloggs, who climbed Mt. Everest on hands and knees. But who,
as it happened, turned out to be an invention of the journalists at the
Merseyside Newsletter, “W and O,” vacuous name, identificatory use,
non-identificatory use, subscript device. Davidson and Hintikka were well aware
of the New-World impact of the Old-World ideas displayed by Grice and
Strawson in their attack to Quine. Quine had indeed addressed Grices and
Strawsons sophisticated version of the paradigm-case argument in Word and
Object. Davidson and Hintikka arranged to publish a special issue for a
periodical publication, to which Strawson had already contributed. It was only
natural, when Davidson and Hintikka were informed by Reidel of their interest
in turning the special issue into a separate volume, that they would approach
the other infamous member of the dynamic duo! Commissioned by Davidson and
Hintikka for “W and O.” Grice introduces a subscript device to account for implicatura
of utterances like Marmaduke Bloggs won’t be attending the party; he was
invented by the journalists. In the later section, he explores
identificatory and non identificatory uses of the without involving himself in
the problems Donnellan did! Some philosophers, notably Ostertag, have
found the latter section the most intriguing bit, and thus Ostertag cared to
reprint the section on Descriptions for his edited MIT volume on the topic. The
essay is structured very systematically with an initial section on a calculus
alla Gentzen, followed by implicatura of vacuous Namess such as Marmaduke
Bloggs, to end with definite descriptions, repr. in Ostertag, and psychological
predicates. It is best to focus on a few things here. First his imaginary
dialogues on Marmaduke Bloggs, brilliant! Second, this as a preamble to his
Presupposition and conversational implicaturum. There is a quantifier phrase,
the, and two uses of it: one is an identificatory use (the haberdasher is
clumsy, or THE haberdasher is clumsy, as Grice prefers) and then theres a
derived, non-identificatory use: the haberdasher (whoever she was! to use
Grices and Mitchells addendum) shows her clumsiness. The use of the numeric
subscripts were complicated enough to delay the publication of this. The whole
thing was a special issue of a journal. Grices contribution came when Reidel
turned that into a volume. Grice later replaced his numeric subscript device by
square brackets. Perhaps the square brackets are not subtle enough,
though. Grices contribution, Vacuous Namess, later repr. in part “Definite
descriptions,” ed. Ostertag, concludes with an exploration of the phrases, and
further on, with some intriguing remarks on the subtle issues surrounding the
scope of an ascription of a predicate standing for a psychological state or
attitude. Grices choice of an ascription now notably involves an
opaque (rather than factive, like know) psychological state or attitude:
wanting, which he symbolizes as W. At least Grice does not write,
really, for he knew that Austin detested a trouser word! Grice concludes that
(xi) and (xiii) will be derivable from each of (ix) and (x), while (xii) will
be derivable only from (ix).Grice had been Strawsons logic tutor at St. Johns
(Mabbott was teaching the grand stuff!) and it shows! One topic that especially
concerned Grice relates to the introduction and elimination rules, as he later
searches for generic satisfactoriness. Grice
wonders [W]hat should be said of Takeutis conjecture (roughly)
that the nature of the introduction rule determines the character of
the elimination rule? There seems to be
no particular problem about allowing an introduction rule which tells
us that, if it is established in Xs personalized system that φ, then it is
necessary with respect to X that φ is true (establishable). The accompanying
elimination rule is, however, slightly less promising. If we suppose such a
rule to tell us that, if one is committed to the idea that it is necessary with
respect to X that φ, then one is also committed to whatever is expressed by φ,
we shall be in trouble; for such a rule is not acceptable; φ will be a volitive
expression such as let it be that X eats his hat; and my commitment to the idea
that Xs system requires him to eat his hat does not ipso facto involve me in
accepting (buletically) let X eat his hat. But if we take the elimination rule
rather as telling us that, if it is necessary with respect to X that let X eat
his hat, then let X eat his hat possesses satisfactoriness-with-respect-to-X,
the situation is easier; for this version of the rule seems inoffensive, even
for Takeuti, we hope. A very interesting concept Grice introduces in the
definite-descriptor section of Vacuous Namess is that of a conversational
dossier, for which he uses δ for a definite descriptor. The key concept is that
of conversational dossier overlap, common ground, or conversational pool. Let
us say that an utterer U has a dossier for a definite description δ if there is
a set of definite descriptions which include δ, all the members of which the
utterer supposes to be satisfied by one and the same item and the utterer U
intends his addressee A to think (via the recognition that A is so intended)
that the utterer U has a dossier for the definite description δ which the
utterer uses, and that the utterer U has specifically selected (or chosen, or
picked) this specific δ from this dossier at least partly in the hope that his
addressee A has his own dossier for δ which overlaps the utterers dossier for δ,
viz. shares a substantial, or in some way specially favoured, su-bset with the
utterers dossier. Its unfortunate that the idea of a dossier is not better
known amog Oxonian philosophers. Unlike approaches to the phenomenon by other
Oxonian philosophers like Grices tutee Strawson and his three principles
(conversational relevance, presumption of conversational knowledge, and
presumption of conversational ignorance) or Urmson and his, apter than
Strawsons, principle of conversational appositeness (Mrs.Smiths husband just
delivered a letter, You mean the postman!?), only Grice took to task the idea
of formalising this in terms of set-theory and philosophical
psychology ‒ note his charming reference to the utterers hope (never
mind intention) that his choice of d from his dossier will overlap with some d
in the dossier of his his addressee. The point of adding whoever he may be for
the non-identificatory is made by Mitchell, of Worcester, in his Griceian
textbook for Hutchinson. Refs.: The main reference is Grice’s “Vacuous names,”
in “W and O” and its attending notes, BANC.
doxastic – discussed by J. L. Austin in the myth of the cave.
Plato is doing some form of linguistic botany when he distinguishes between the
doxa and the episteme – Stich made it worse with his ‘sub-doxastic’! from
Grecian doxa, ‘belief’, of or pertaining to belief. A doxastic mental state,
for instance, is or incorporates a belief. Doxastic states of mind are to be
distinguished, on the one hand, from such non-doxastic states as desires,
sensations, and emotions, and, on the other hand, from subdoxastic states. By
extension, a doxastic principle is a principle governing belief. A doxastic
principle might set out conditions under which an agent’s forming or abandoning
a belief is justified epistemically or otherwise.
doxographia
griceiana -- Griceian doxographers. A
Griceian doxographer is a a compiler of andcommentators on the opinions of
Grice. “I am my first doxographer,” Grice said. Grice enjoyed the term coined
by H. Diels for the title of his work “Doxographi Graeci,” which Grice typed
“Doxographi Gricei”. In his “Doxographi,” Diels assembles a series of Grecian
texts in which the views of Grecian philosophers from the archaic to the
Hellenistic era are set out in a relatively schematic way. In the introduction,
Diels reconstructs the history of the writing of these opinions, viz. the
doxography strictly – the ‘writing’ (graphein) of the ‘opinion’ (“doxa”) – cfr.
the unwritten opinions; Diels’s ‘Doxographi’ is now a standard part of the
historiography of philosophy. Doxography is important both as a source of
information about a philosopher, and also because a later philosopher (later
than Grice, that is), ancient, medieval, and modern, should rely on it besides
what Diels calls the ‘primary’ material – “what Grice actually philosophised
on.” The crucial text for Diels’s reconstruction is the book Physical Opinions
of the Philosophers Placita Philosophorum, traditionally ascribed to Plutarch
but no longer thought to be by him. “Placita philosophorum” lists the views of
various philosophers and schools under subject headings such as “What Is
Nature?” and “On the Rainbow.” Out of this oeuvre and others Diels reconstructs
a Collection of Opinions that he ascribes to Aetius, a philosopher mentioned by
Theodoret as its author. Diels takes Aetius’s ultimate source to be
Theophrastus, who wrote a more discursive Physical Opinions. Because Aetius
mentions the views of Hellenistic philosophers writing after Theophrastus,
Diels postulates an intermediate source, which he calls the “Vetusta Placita.” The
most accessible doxographical material for Grice is in “The Life of Opinions of
the Eminent Philosopher H. P. Grice,” “Vita et sententiae H. P. Griceiani quo
in philosophia probatus fuit.” by H. P. Grice, après “Vitae et sententiae eorum qui in
philosophia probati fuerunt,”
by Diogenes Laertius, who is, however, mainly interested in gossip.
Laertius arranges philosophers by schools and treats each school
chronologically.
dummett – Dummett on ‘implicaturum’ in “Truth and other
enigmas” – Note the animosity by Dummett against
Grice’s playgroup for Grice never inviting him to a Saturday morning! “I will say this: conversational implicaturum, or as he
fastidiously would prefer, the ‘implicaturum,’ was, yes, ‘invented,’ by H. P.
Grice, of St. John’s, but University Lecturer, to boot, to replace an abstract
semantic concept such as Frege’s ‘Sinn,’ expelled in Grice’s original
Playgroup’s determination to pay attention, in the typical Oxonian manner, to
nothing but what an *emisor* (never mind his emission!) ‘communicates’ in a
‘particularised’ context — so that was a good thing -- for Grice!” “Truth and other enigmas.” Cited by Grice in Way of
Words -- dummett, m. a. e. – cited by H. P. Grice. philosopher of language,
logic, and mathematics, noted for his sympathy for metaphysical antirealism and
for his exposition of the philosophy of Frege. Dummett regards allegiance to
the principle of bivalence as the hallmark of a realist attitude toward any
field of discourse. This is the principle that any meaningful assertoric
sentence must be determinately either true or else false, independently of
anyone’s ability to ascertain its truth-value by recourse to appropriate
empirical evidence or methods of proof. According to Dummett, the sentences of
any learnable language cannot have verification-transcendent truth conditions
and consequently we should query the intelligibility of certain statements that
realists regard as meaningful. On these grounds, he calls into question realism
about the past and realism in the philosophy of mathematics in several of the
papers in two collections of his essays, Truth and Other Enigmas 8 and The Seas
of Language 3. In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics 1, Dummett makes clear his
view that the fundamental questions of metaphysics have to be approached
through the philosophy of language, and more specifically through the theory of
meaning. Here his philosophical debts to Frege and Vitters are manifest.
Dummett has been the world’s foremost expositor and champion of Frege’s
philosophy, above all in two highly influential books, Frege: Philosophy of
Language 3 and Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics 1. This is despite the fact
that Frege himself advocated a form of Platonism in semantics and the
philosophy of mathematics that is quite at odds with Dummett’s own anti-realist
inclinations. It would appear, however, from what Dummett says in Origins of
Analytical Philosophy 3, that he regards Frege’s great achievement as that of
having presaged the “linguistic turn” in philosophy that was to see its most
valuable fruit in the later work of Vitters. Vitters’s principle that grasp of
the meaning of a linguistic expression must be exhaustively manifested by the
use of that expression is one that underlies Dummett’s own approach to meaning
and his anti-realist leanings. In logic and the philosophy of mathematics this
is shown in Dummett’s sympathy for the intuitionistic approach of Brouwer and
Heyting, which involves a repudiation of the law of excluded middle, as set
forth in Dummett’s own book on the subject, Elements of Intuitionism 7.
dyad -- co-agency: social action: Grice: “My principle of
co-operation you can call the ‘conversational contract.’ In this respect, I
agree with Grice: Grice: “When I speak of conversation, I mean of a social
action – where one agent’s expectations influence his co-agent’s” -- a subclass
of human action involving the interaction among agents and their mutual
orientation, or the action of groups. While all intelligible actions are in
some sense social, social actions must be directed to others. Talcott Parsons
279 captured what is distinctive about social action in his concept of “double
contingency,” and similar concepts have been developed by other philosophers
and sociologists, including Weber, Mead, and Vitters. Whereas in monological
action the agents’ fulfilling their purposes depends only on contingent facts
about the world, the success of social action is also contingent on how other
agents react to what the agent does and how that agent reacts to other agents,
and so on. An agent successfully communicates, e.g., not merely by finding some
appropriate expression in an existing symbol system, but also by understanding
how other agents will understand him. Game theory describes and explains
another type of double contingency in its analysis of the interdependency of
choices and strategies among rational agents. Games are also significant in two
other respects. First, they exemplify the cognitive requirements for social
interaction, as in Mead’s analysis of agents’ perspective taking: as a subject
“I”, I am an object for others “me”, and can take a third-person perspective
along with others on the interaction itself “the generalized other”. Second,
games are regulated by shared rules and mediated through symbolic meanings;
Vitters’s private language argument establishes that rules cannot be followed
“privately.” Some philosophers, such as Peter Winch, conclude from this
argument that rule-following is a basic feature of distinctively social action.
Some actions are social in the sense that they can only be done in groups.
Individualists such as Weber, Jon Elster, and Raimo Tuomela believe that these
can be analyzed as the sum of the actions of each individual. But holists such
as Marx, Durkheim, and Margaret Gilbert reject this reduction and argue that in
social actions agents must see themselves as members of a collective agent.
Holism has stronger or weaker versions: strong holists, such as Durkheim and
Hegel, see the collective subject as singular, the collective consciousness of
a society. Weak holists, such as Gilbert and Habermas, believe that social
actions have plural, rather than singular, collective subjects. Holists
generally establish the plausibility of their view by referring to larger
contexts and sequences of action, such as shared symbol systems or social
institutions. Explanations of social actions thus refer not only to the mutual
expectations of agents, but also to these larger causal contexts, shared
meanings, and mechanisms of coordination. Theories of social action must then
explain the emergence of social order, and proposals range from Hobbes’s
coercive authority to Talcott Parsons’s value consensus about shared goals
among the members of groups. -- social
biology, the understanding of social behavior, especially human social
behavior, from a biological perspective; often connected with the political
philosophy of social Darwinism. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species highlighted
the significance of social behavior in organic evolution, and in the Descent of
Man, he showed how significant such behavior is for humans. He argued that it
is a product of natural selection; but it was not until 4 that the English
biologist William Hamilton showed precisely how such behavior could evolve,
namely through “kin selection” as an aid to the biological wellbeing of close
relatives. Since then, other models of explanation have been proposed,
extending the theory to non-relatives. Best known is the self-describing
“reciprocal altruism.” Social biology became notorious in 5 when Edward O.
Wilson published a major treatise on the subject: Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis. Accusations of sexism and racism were leveled because Wilson
suggested that Western social systems are biologically innate, and that in some
respects males are stronger, more aggressive, more naturally promiscuous than
females. Critics argued that all social biology is in fact a manifestation of
social Darwinism, a nineteenthcentury philosophy owing more to Herbert Spencer
than to Charles Darwin, supposedly legitimating extreme laissez-faire economics
and an unbridled societal struggle for existence. Such a charge is extremely
serious, for as Moore pointed out in his Principia Ethica 3, Spencer surely
commits the naturalistic fallacy, inasmuch as he is attempting to derive the
way that the world ought to be from the way that it is. Naturally enough,
defenders of social biology, or “sociobiology” as it is now better known,
denied vehemently that their science is mere right-wing ideology by another
name. They pointed to many who have drawn very different social conclusions on
the basis of biology. Best known is the Russian anarchist Kropotkin, who argued
that societies are properly based on a biological propensity to mutual aid. With
respect to contemporary debate, it is perhaps fairest to say that sociobiology,
particularly that pertaining to humans, did not always show sufficient
sensitivity toward all societal groups
although certainly there was never the crude racism of the fascist
regimes of the 0s. However, recent work is far more careful in these respects.
Now, indeed, the study of social behavior from a biological perspective is one
of the most exciting and forward-moving branches of the life sciences. -- social choice theory, the theory of the
rational action of a group of agents. Important social choices are typically
made over alternative means of collectively providing goods. These might be
goods for individual members of the group, or more characteristically, public
goods, goods such that no one can be excluded from enjoying their benefits once
they are available. Perhaps the most central aspect of social choice theory
concerns rational individual choice in a social context. Since what is rational
for one agent to do will often depend on what is rational for another to do and
vice versa, these choices take on a strategic dimension. The prisoner’s dilemma
illustrates how it can be very difficult to reconcile individual and
collectively rational decisions, especially in non-dynamic contexts. There are
many situations, particularly in the provision of public goods, however, where
simple prisoner’s dilemmas can be avoided and more manageable coordination
problems remain. In these cases, individuals may find it rational to contractually
or conventionally bind themselves to courses of action that lead to the greater
good of all even though they are not straightforwardly utility-maximizing for
particular individuals. Establishing the rationality of these contracts or
conventions is one of the leading problems of social choice theory, because
coordination can collapse if a rational agent first agrees to cooperate and
then reneges and becomes a free rider on the collective efforts of others.
Other forms of uncooperative behaviors such as violating rules established by
society or being deceptive about one’s preferences pose similar difficulties.
Hobbes attempted to solve these problems by proposing that people would agree
to submit to the authority of a sovereign whose punitive powers would make
uncooperative behavior an unattractive option. It has also been argued that
cooperation is rational if the concept of rationality is extended beyond
utility-maximizing in the right way. Other arguments stress benefits beyond
selfinterest that accrue to cooperators. Another major aspect of social choice
theory concerns the rational action of a powerful central authority, or social
planner, whose mission is to optimize the social good. Although the central
planner may be instituted by rational individual choice, this part of the
theory simply assumes the institution. The planner’s task of making a onetime
allocation of resources to the production of various commodities is tractable
if social good or social utility is known as a function of various commodities.
When the planner must take into account dynamical considerations, the technical
problems are more difficult. This economic growth theory raises important
ethical questions about intergenerational conflict. The assumption of a social
analogue of the individual utility functions is particularly worrisome. It can
be shown formally that taking the results of majority votes can lead to
intransitive social orderings of possible choices and it is, therefore, a
generally unsuitable procedure for the planner to follow. Moreover, under very
general conditions there is no way of aggregating individual preferences into a
consistent social choice function of the kind needed by the planner. -- social constructivism, also called social
constructionism, any of a variety of views which claim that knowledge in some
area is the product of our social practices and institutions, or of the
interactions and negotiations between relevant social groups. Mild versions
hold that social factors shape interpretations of the world. Stronger versions
maintain that the world, or some significant portion of it, is somehow
constituted by theories, practices, and institutions. Defenders often move from
mild to stronger versions by insisting that the world is accessible to us only
through our interpretations, and that the idea of an independent reality is at
best an irrelevant abstraction and at worst incoherent. This philosophical
position is distinct from, though distantly related to, a view of the same name
in social and developmental psychology, associated with such figures as Piaget
and Lev Vygotsky, which sees learning as a process in which subjects actively
construct knowledge. Social constructivism has roots in Kant’s idealism, which
claims that we cannot know things in themselves and that knowledge of the world
is possible only by imposing pre-given categories of thought on otherwise
inchoate experience. But where Kant believed that the categories with which we
interpret and thus construct the world are given a priori, contemporary
constructivists believe that the relevant concepts and associated practices
vary from one group or historical period to another. Since there are no
independent standards for evaluating conceptual schemes, social constructivism
leads naturally to relativism. These views are generally thought to be present
in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that
observation and methods in science are deeply theory-dependent and that
scientists with fundamentally different assumptions or paradigms effectively
live in different worlds. Kuhn thus offers a view of science in opposition to
both scientific realism which holds that theory-dependent methods can give us
knowledge of a theory-independent world and empiricism which draws a sharp line
between theory and observation. Kuhn was reluctant to accept the apparently
radical consequences of his views, but his work has influenced recent social
studies of science, whose proponents frequently embrace both relativism and
strong constructivism. Another influence is the principle of symmetry advocated
by David Bloor and Barry Barnes, which holds that sociologists should explain
the acceptance of scientific views in the same way whether they believe those
views to be true or to be false. This approach is elaborated in the work of
Harry Collins, Steve Woolgar, and others. Constructivist themes are also
prominent in the work of feminist critics of science such as Sandra Harding and
Donna Haraway, and in the complex views of Bruno Latour. Critics, such as Richard
Boyd and Philip Kitcher, while applauding the detailed case studies produced by
constructivists, claim that the positive arguments for constructivism are
fallacious, that it fails to account satisfactorily for actual scientific
practice, and that like other versions of idealism and relativism it is only
dubiously coherent. Then there’s the
idea of a ‘contract,’ or social contract, an agreement either between the
people and their ruler, or among the people in a community. The idea of a
social contract has been used in arguments that differ in what they aim to
justify or explain e.g., the state, conceptions of justice, morality, what they
take the problem of justification to be, and whether or not they presuppose a
moral theory or purport to be a moral theory. Traditionally the term has been
used in arguments that attempt to explain the nature of political obligation
and/or the kind of responsibility that rulers have to their subjects.
Philosophers such as Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant argue that human
beings would find life in a prepolitical “state of nature” a state that some
argue is also presocietal so difficult that they would agree either with one another or with a prospective
ruler to the creation of political
institutions that each believes would improve his or her lot. Note that because
the argument explains political or social cohesion as the product of an
agreement among individuals, it makes these individuals conceptually prior to
political or social units. Marx and other socialist and communitarian thinkers
have argued against conceptualizing an individual’s relationship to her
political and social community in this way. Have social contracts in political
societies actually taken place? Hume ridicules the idea that they are real, and
questions what value makebelieve agreements can have as explanations of actual
political obligations. Although many social contract theorists admit that there
is almost never an explicit act of agreement in a community, nonetheless they
maintain that such an agreement is implicitly made when members of the society
engage in certain acts through which they give their tacit consent to the
ruling regime. It is controversial what actions constitute giving tacit
consent: Plato and Locke maintain that the acceptance of benefits is sufficient
to give such consent, but some have argued that it is wrong to feel obliged to
those who foist upon us benefits for which we have not asked. It is also
unclear how much of an obligation a person can be under if he gives only tacit
consent to a regime. How are we to understand the terms of a social contract
establishing a state? When the people agree to obey the ruler, do they
surrender their own power to him, as Hobbes tried to argue? Or do they merely
lend him that power, reserving the right to take it from him if and when they
see fit, as Locke maintained? If power is merely on loan to the ruler,
rebellion against him could be condoned if he violates the conditions of that
loan. But if the people’s grant of power is a surrender, there are no such
conditions, and the people could never be justified in taking back that power
via revolution. Despite controversies surrounding their interpretation, social
contract arguments have been important to the development of modern democratic
states: the idea of the government as the creation of the people, which they
can and should judge and which they have the right to overthrow if they find it
wanting, contributed to the development of democratic forms of polity in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
and revolutionaries explicitly
acknowledged their debts to social contract theorists such as Locke and
Rousseau. In the twentieth century, the social contract idea has been used as a
device for defining various moral conceptions e.g. theories of justice by those
who find its focus on individuals useful in the development of theories that
argue against views e.g. utilitarianism that allow individuals to be sacrificed
for the benefit of the group -- social epistemology, the study of the social
dimensions or determinants of knowledge, or the ways in which social factors
promote or perturb the quest for knowledge. Some writers use the term
‘knowledge’ loosely, as designating mere belief. On their view social
epistemology should simply describe how social factors influence beliefs,
without concern for the rationality or truth of these beliefs. Many historians
and sociologists of science, e.g., study scientific practices in the same
spirit that anthropologists study native cultures, remaining neutral about the
referential status of scientists’ constructs or the truth-values of their
beliefs. Others try to show that social factors like political or professional
interests are causally operative, and take such findings to debunk any
objectivist pretensions of science. Still other writers retain a normative,
critical dimension in social epistemology, but do not presume that social
practices necessarily undermine objectivity. Even if knowledge is construed as
true or rational belief, social practices might enhance knowledge acquisition.
One social practice is trusting the opinions of authorities, a practice that
can produce truth if the trusted authorities are genuinely authoritative. Such
trust may also be perfectly rational in a complex world, where division of
epistemic labor is required. Even a scientist’s pursuit of extra-epistemic
interests such as professional rewards may not be antithetical to truth in
favorable circumstances. Institutional provisions, e.g., judicial rules of
evidence, provide another example of social factors. Exclusionary rules might
actually serve the cause of truth or accuracy in judgment if the excluded
evidence would tend to mislead or prejudice jurors. -- social philosophy, broadly the philosophy
of socisocial Darwinism social philosophy 856
856 ety, including the philosophy of social science and many of its
components, e.g., economics and history, political philosophy, most of what we
now think of as ethics, and philosophy of law. But we may distinguish two
narrower senses. In one, it is the conceptual theory of society, including the
theory of the study of society the
common part of all the philosophical studies mentioned. In the other, it is a
normative study, the part of moral philosophy that concerns social action and individual
involvement with society in general. The central job of social philosophy in
the first of these narrower senses is to articulate the correct notion or
concept of society. This would include formulating a suitable definition of
‘society’; the question is then which concepts are better for which purposes,
and how they are related. Thus we may distinguish “thin” and “thick”
conceptions of society. The former would identify the least that can be said
before we cease talking about society at all
say, a number of people who interact, whose actions affect the behavior
of their fellows. Thicker conceptions would then add such things as community
rules, goals, customs, and ideals. An important empirical question is whether
any interacting groups ever do lack such things and what if anything is common
to the rules, etc., that actual societies have. Descriptive social philosophy
will obviously border on, if not merge into, social science itself, e.g. into
sociology, social psychology, or economics. And some outlooks in social
philosophy will tend to ally with one social science as more distinctively
typical than others e.g., the
individualist view looks to economics, the holist to sociology. A major
methodological controversy concerns holism versus individualism. Holism
maintains that at least some social groups must be studied as units,
irreducible to their members: we cannot understand a society merely by
understanding the actions and motivations of its members. Individualism denies
that societies are “organisms,” and holds that we can understand society only
in that way. Classic G. sociologists e.g., Weber distinguished between
Gesellschaft, whose paradigm is the voluntary association, such as a chess
club, whose activities are the coordinated actions of a number of people who
intentionally join that group in order to pursue the purposes that identify it;
and Gemeinschaft, whose members find their identities in that group. Thus,
the are not a group whose members teamed
up with like-minded people to form society.
They were before they had separate
individual purposes. The holist views society as essentially a Gemeinschaft.
Individualists agree that there are such groupings but deny that they require a
separate kind of irreducibly collective explanation: to understand the we must understand how typical individuals behave compared, say, with the G.s, and so on. The
methods of Western economics typify the analytical tendencies of methodological
individualism, showing how we can understand large-scale economic phenomena in
terms of the rational actions of particular economic agents. Cf. Adam Smith’s
invisible hand thesis: each economic agent seeks only his own good, yet the
result is the macrophenomenal good of the whole. Another pervasive issue
concerns the role of intentional characterizations and explanations in these
fields. Ordinary people explain behavior by reference to its purposes, and they
formulate these in terms that rely on public rules of language and doubtless
many other rules. To understand society, we must hook onto the
selfunderstanding of the people in that society this view is termed Verstehen.
Recent work in philosophy of science raises the question whether intentional
concepts can really be fundamental in explaining anything, and whether we must
ultimately conceive people as in some sense material systems, e.g. as
computer-like. Major questions for the program of replicating human
intelligence in data-processing terms cf. artificial intelligence are raised by
the symbolic aspects of interaction. Additionally, we should note the emergence
of sociobiology as a potent source of explanations of social phenomena.
Normative social philosophy, in turn, tends inevitably to merge into either
politics or ethics, especially the part of ethics dealing with how people ought
to treat others, especially in large groups, in relation to social institutions
or social structures. This contrasts with ethics in the sense concerned with
how individual people may attain the good life for themselves. All such theories
allot major importance to social relations; but if one’s theory leaves the
individual wide freedom of choice, then a theory of individually chosen goods
will still have a distinctive subject matter. The normative involvements of
social philosophy have paralleled the foregoing in important ways.
Individualists have held that the good of a society must be analyzed in terms
of the goods of its individual members. Of special importance has been the view
that society must respect indisocial philosophy social philosophy 857 857 vidual rights, blocking certain actions
alleged to promote social good as a whole. Organicist philosophers such as
Hegel hold that it is the other way around: the state or nation is higher than
the individual, who is rightly subordinated to it, and individuals have
fundamental duties toward the groups of which they are members. Outrightly
fascist versions of such views are unpopular today, but more benign versions
continue in modified form, notably by communitarians. Socialism and especially
communism, though focused originally on economic aspects of society, have
characteristically been identified with the organicist outlook. Their extreme
opposite is to be found in the libertarians, who hold that the right to
individual liberty is fundamental in society, and that no institutions may
override that right. Libertarians hold that society ought to be treated
strictly as an association, a Gesellschaft, even though they might not deny
that it is ontogenetically Gemeinschaft. They might agree that religious
groups, e.g., cannot be wholly understood as separate individuals.
Nevertheless, the libertarian holds that religious and cultural practices may
not be interfered with or even supported by society. Libertarians are strong
supporters of free-market economic methods, and opponents of any sort of state
intervention into the affairs of individuals. Social Darwinism, advocating the
“survival of the socially fittest,” has sometimes been associated with the
libertarian view. Insofar as there is any kind of standard view on these
matters, it combines elements of both individualism and holism. Typical social
philosophers today accept that society has duties, not voluntary for individual
members, to support education, health, and some degree of welfare for all. But
they also agree that individual rights are to be respected, especially civil
rights, such as freedom of speech and religion. How to combine these two
apparently disparate sets of ideas into a coherent whole is the problem. John
Rawls’s celebrated Theory of Justice, 1, is a contemporary classic that
attempts to do just that. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Grice and Grice on the
conversational contract.”
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