The Grice Club

Grice on "Izz" and "Hazz": the Kantotelian background

2012-02-02T11:01:00.000-08:00

Speranza

There is an online discussion going on between D. O'Brien and R. B. Jones. I'm reporting those bits which concern Grice, for the record.

Jones refers to his

"point of entry into Aristotle."

"My interest was provoked by ... a version
of set of semi-formal principles formulated by [Alan Dodds] Code [former student of Grice at UC/Berkeley]
following his collaboration with Grice on some
Aristotelian studies. Grice was interested inter alia
in "the multiplicity of being", i.e. in whether the
verb "to be" has many different or one single "sense".

D. O'Brien:

"Recall that our own discussion stems from your enquiries
regarding several rather modern interpretations of the
Aristotelian categorical propositions (A,E,I,O types)
w.r.t. 20th c. controversies regarding "existential
import" and "non-empty predicates". Thus our discussion
hasn't been of "being qua being", but of that highly
qualified sense in which being might be affirmed or
denied in a proposition (as defined by Aristotle).
"Being qua being" is discussed in the Metaphysics, and
if I recall correctly, somewhere in those books
Aristotle argues that being has no single highest genus.
I'm quite rusty on the matter since it's been a long
time since I read the books, but for sure Aristotle
distinguishes between the beings of physical and
mathematical individuals, e.g. between a cat and a
number, and in rhetoric he distinguishes many other
kinds of being, metaphorical, representational,
hypothetical, etc."

Jones:

"I am aware of the distinction between the metaphysics and
the organon. However, part of the point at issue with [Alan Dodds] Code was in what
logical context the examination of Aristotle might best be
conducted.
He suggested that it was then common to work with a first
order logic but himself chose to work with some "semi-
formal" notations."

---- Indeed. Grice has a lot to say about First-Order Predicate Calculus With Identity. And indeed, Izz and Hazz diverge from it. There is a way in which they don't.

Ixy
Hxy

i.e. Izz and Hazz would be two-place predicates. And so the logic of Izz and Hazz can be seen as a variety of a first-order predicate calculus, with identity (vide Grice, "Reply to Richards" for his short commentary on First Order Predicate Calculus with Identity -- his locution).

Jones:

"I thought that it would be interesting to see whether the
metaphysics fitted well with Aristotelian logic, and so I
attempted to construct models of both.
I did the syllogism separately at first, and we had some
exchanges on this, and I did a model which encompassed both
the syllogism and certain aspects of the metaphysics,
including the difference between essential and accidental
predication.
I don't believe we discussed this."

Jones:

"In this connection Grice coined two words to
unambiguously express essential and accidental
predication, viz: "izz" and "hazz"."

D. O'Brien objects:

"This is a different question than whether being has a
single sense."

Jones aptly replies:

"It isn't a question at all, but it certainly is something
which any opinion on whether there are multiple sense of
being would need to take into account (to be taken seriously
by me!)."

To be considered later. This is best seen in terms of what Grice calls the Modified Occam's Razor ("Do not multiply senses [not just entities -- 'entia'] beyond necessity" -- entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.).

D. O'Brien:

"Socrates, for example, had a temporal,
ephemeral being contingent on his birth and death dates,
and this is so regardless of the fact that, when we say
that Socrates was human and so Socrates was a mammal,
according as the syllogism this last was predicated
essentially of Socrates in virtue of the definition of
his humanity. Likewise, if Socrates had a pug-nose,
this would be an accidental predication of one and the
same Socrates. Socrates, the subject of these
propositions, isn't being said to have this or that mode
or kind of existence, but is said to be a subject which
this or that quality or property etc. belongs to."

Jones, like me, agrees:

"Well, that is interesting, and it may well bear on the
question which Grice was interested in."

It does. Grice was also pretty obsessed with relative identity, which may bear on this. Consider the first opera ever, "Dafne": a girl, called Dafne, turned into a plant of laurel (In Greek, "laurel" is called "Dafne").

Here we have

a = a
a = b

Grice, following arguments by Geach, and in collaboration with Myro, came to the conclusion that,

Socrates is essentially human --.

If Socrates is changed into a plant of laurel (as he wasn't), the formerly essential predication ("Socrates IZZ human") no longer applies, since Socrates IZZ now a plant.

--- vide Myro, "Identity and Time", in PGRICE. Along with the Code essay (on Grice on izz and hazz) in the "Metaphysics" section of PGRICE.

Jones:

"I have not yet come to understanding of Grice on this, and
in particular I still do not understand what are the
criteria he applies in deciding whether a word has one or
many "senses"."

It's his "Modified Occam's Razor". He coined 'implicature' to save appearances. So we can now argue that, if this philosopher (his target: Owens, the Welsh Aristotelian scholar) had said that, for Aristotle, 'being' bears 'semantic multiplicity' ("The snares of ontology" is Owens's paper cited by Grice), there is a way to deal with that. We can explain the divergence in terms of 'implicature'. Or we can expand on the 'deep berths' of language, and play with the syntax: we would have not just

"S izz P"

as the logical form, but at least two varieties:

"S izz P"

and

"S hazz P".

In other words, Grice, alla Kantotle, brings 'hazz' to metaphysical notoriety.

Jones:

"Up and till now, I had not thought that he was asking about
kinds of existence, but rather about kinds of predication,
which is what izz and hazz are concerned with."

Grice briefly refers to a "Meinongian jungle" in "Vacuous Names", and in "Method in philosophical psychology" he speaks of "Ontological Marxism" (Entities, if they work, they exist"). So his deepest motivation was into kinds of existence.

D. O' Brien:

"I've read of no usage similar to a Grice's "izz" and
"hazz" in either the direct translations of Aristotle,
or the various commentaries that I've scanned through.
I understand the intent behind this coinage, but in
practice I don't see why anyone would require the added
complexity."

It would be good to comment on direct translations from the Greek. Recall that it was Grice's student, J. L. Ackrill, who started the tendency of discussing Aristotle in the local vernacular of Oxford (English) rather than the local vernacular of Athens. (Grice on "Oxonian Dialectic" and "Athenian Dialectic" in Studies in the Way of Words, "Retrospective Epilogue"). "A bad practice", Grice added.

Jones aptly challenges that:

"It does not add complexity.
These words correspond directly to a distinction expressed
by Aristotle which is not clearly made in ordinary language,
and it is just convenient when considering the differences
between accidental and essential predication to be able to
state a proposition in a way which makes it explicit and
unambiguous whether essential or accidental predication is
involved.
When the predicates are themselves variable names there is
no other way to know."

Which was a brilliant thing to say.

----

Jones:

"My formal treatment of the Aristotelian syllogism,
which we discussed on phil-logic, and in which
discussion you eventually persuaded me of the two
points recently mentioned in relation to predication
in Aristotle's philosophy, that affirmative
propositions carry existential import and that there
is no presumption of non-emptyness of the extension of
terms."
"My last combined formal treatment of the syllogism with
this distinction of types of predicate was done before
that happened and is therefore based on the opinion of
Robin Smith that Aristotle should be understood to
presume non- empty term extensions. However, even
without the present revelations (of which more in a
second) this treatment suggests that the theory of the
syllogism is in need of modification once Aristotle's
distinction between essential and accidental
predication (as given in the Metaphysics rather than
the Categories) is taken into account."

O'Brien:

"What "theory of the syllogism" are you talking about
here?"

Jones:

"The word "theory" here has a precise meaning in relation to
the tool ProofPower which I have been using in constructing
models of various aspects of Aristotle's syllogism and
metaphysics.
The result of my formal work is a set of "theories" each of
which consists of some definitions and some theorems derived
from them.
Listings of these theories may be found in appendix A of:
http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/pp/doc/t028.pdf
Nothing I have said should suggest to you that it is my
purpose to "correct" Aristotle, I am simply trying to
understand him (in small part) and his place in the history
of certain ideas."

O' Brien:

"Aristotle's? Do you seriously think Aristotle's
theory of categorical logic has to be modified, as based
on your reading of his distinction between
essential/accidental predications?"

Jones:

"No."

Jones:

"What Maritain tells us presents a further difficulty,
> > if it is intended to be a claim about Aristotle's
> > philosophy (though this seems doubtful given that
> > Maritain was a thomist rather than an Aristotelian,
> > and even then not a blind follower of Thomas but one
> > progressing along the direction he set out, and does
> > not appear to be making, or justifying claims about
> > Thomas or Aristotle, but rather stating his own views
> > on the matters treated by them)."

O'Brien:

"> I don't know on what you base these judgments of
> Maritain's work. I don't know what it could mean that
> "Maritain was a Thomist rather than an Aristotelian"."

Jones:

"Until you mentioned Maritain I had never even heard of him.
On reading your message I consulted the Stanford
Encyclopaedia where he is described along the lines which I
used above.
I then downloaded the PDF of the work which you mentioned,
and consulted just the page you referred to and perhaps a
little of the context.
In saying that Maritain was a Thomist rather than an
Aristotelian I am considering the possibility that the view
expressed by Maritain may not all be opinions which were
held by Aristotle.
It is certainly the case that the medieval logicians went
beyond what is explicit in Aristotle, they do so
notationally by devising the AEIO notation, they do so by
identifying more valid syllogisms.
Maritain is represented by SEP as an original philosopher,
not merely an Aristotelian scholar, and we must therefore in
reading what he says not assume that he is confining himself
to opinions which can be shown to have been held by
Aristotle."

O'Brien:

"> To say that he was a "Thomist" is really no more
> than to say that he wrote his texts specifically for use
> in seminaries of the Catholic church, where there's a
> Thomist tradition, but little more than that."

Jones:
"I would be very surprised if that was what the author of the
SEP article intended to say."

Jones:

"> > Maritain says that the existential import is associated
> > with affirmative propositions only if they are
> > accidental, not if they are essential."

O'Brien:

> Maritain doesn't say anything like that.

Jones:

"Indeed he does not.
Not, at least, in so many words.
What he does say is that an essential predication of the
form "Some A are B" may be true even if there is no A,
provided only that there is some possible A.
I don't know that either he or Aristotle uses the phrase
"existential import", but in my usage of that term affirming
the consistency of a predicate is not what is meant by
existential import.
So I think what he says is "something like" what I said."

Jones:
> > He does not seem to be offering any way in which we can
> > discover whether a proposition is essential or
> > accidental,

O'Brien:
> Maritain does explain the distinction.

Jones:
"I already understand the distinction.
The issue here is whether one can tell whether any
particular predication is accidental or essential.
This presumably one might do from a knowledge of the
meanings of the terms in the proposition, however, in the
syllogistic one works with variables, and from a
propositional scheme such as "B is predicated of all As"
once does not know whether essential or accidental
predication is involved."

Excellent!

Viscoian Maxims, Griceian Maxims

2012-02-01T12:21:00.000-08:00

Speranza

---

--- begin quoted text:

How To Write Good

by Frank L. Visco

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren't necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don't be redundant; don't more use words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?

---

In the handwritten notes "Logic and Conversation" (ii), Grice has 'sic' in two places:

"Be perspicuous". For really, who knows that 'perspicuity' is _clarity_?

Also:

"Avoid unnecessary prolixity": long for 'be brief'.

--

Visco:

>How To Write Good
>by Frank L. Visco
>My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:

---- as did Grice's way of ideas, way of words.

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.

----

2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)

------- What _is_ a cliche? Grice would say that

"You're the cream in my coffee" meaning "you're my pride and joy" (Grice's gloss), compares with

"They're old hat". To consider.

Note that Grice is interested in breaches to 'sincerity' (say the truth). Someone who says, "you're the cream in my coffee" knows he is saying something false. Grice notes that this type of falsity can be second-order. One can use, 'ironically', "You're the cream in my coffee" to mean, Grice's interpretant, "You're my bane".

----

4. Employ the vernacular.

---- Grice loved it. The etymology of 'vernacular', in the vernacular, is not learned.

5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

----

6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

----- This is indeed the spirit behind Grice's campaign.

7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

8. Contractions aren't necessary.

9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

Incidentally, there's an accent on the 'a' of apropos.

10. One should never generalize.

11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

--- And Marhsall, "Quote in full: chapter and verse".

12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

--- only different.

13. Don't be redundant; don't more use words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.

---- unless you implicate.

14. Profanity sucks.

15. Be more or less specific.

---- avoid unnecessary prolixity, unless you don't. Williamson wrote a book on that: "Vagueness". He claims that since lingo is vague ('more or less specific') per se, one should not say it.

16. Understatement is always best.

--- And implicature is Grice's word for 'understatement', meiosis. The opposite is overstatement, as in "Your handwriting sucks" (Grice's meiosis, and understatement, "He was slightly intoxicated" (said of a man known to have broken the house furniture), and "You have beautiful handwriting" (+> but your philosophy is perhaps not Kantian enough).

17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

---- Grice calls it 'hyperbole': "Every nice girl loves a sailor". "Even in the circumstances that it's a different sailr meant for each girl, this hardly becomes truth-conditional."

18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.

---

19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

----- or a fish without a bicycle.

20. The passive voice is to be avoided.

------ by most people.

21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

vide: Avoid cliches like the rats.

22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

--- e.g. "You're the cream in my coffee, but not the apple of my eye."

23. Who needs rhetorical questions?

Plato? The Pope?

A robin is a robin is a robin

2012-01-31T21:59:00.000-08:00

Speranza

Commentary on the OED.

3. Chiefly N. Amer. A large, migratory thrush, Turdus migratorius (family Turdidae), which has brick red underparts and a dark head, widespread and common in North America. Also more fully American robin. Also (with distinguishing word): any of several similar American thrushes.Earlier in robin redbreast (see robin redbreast n. 2a).
1703 S. Sewall Diary 16 Mar. (1973) I. 483 The Robbins cheerfully utter their Notes this morn.
1750 J. Birket Voy. N. Amer. (1916) 13 They have‥a bird like our field fare with a red brest which they call a Robin that sings delightfully.
1808 A. Wilson Amer. Ornithol. I. 37 The Robin is one of our earliest songsters.
1858 H. W. Longfellow Miles Standish iii. 3 Into the tranquil woods, where blue-birds and robins were building.
1888 G. H. Kingsley in Field 16 June 869/2 In America I shoot robins and find them thrushes.
1931 Times Lit. Suppl. 5 Nov. 859/3 A lovely little bird hardly as large as an American robin.
1966 Vancouver Province 19 Nov. 1/5 The robin had been sitting in a mountain ash tree in his front yard.
1987 Field Guide Birds N. Amer. (National Geographic Soc.) (ed. 2) 330 Rufous-backed Robin. Turdus rufopalliatus.‥ Clay-colored Robin. Turdus grayi.
1992 J. Osborne Cardinal i. 19 Some songbirds occasionally sing from the ground. The American Robin is one of these.
1703—1992(Hide quotations)

4.
Categories »

a. Chiefly N. Amer. Any of various unrelated songbirds that resemble the European or American robin, esp. in having reddish or orange colour on the breast or underside. Usu. with distinguishing word.blue, golden, ground, Pekin, swamp robin, etc.: see the first element.
1769 R. Smith Jrnl. 18 May in Tour Four Great Rivers (1906) 41 The lively Note of the Swamp Robin, the Red Bird and other Birds from the earliest Dawn is entertaining.
1794 Philos. Soc. Trans. 4 110 This bird was the chewink, or ground robin.
1855 Orr's Circle Sci., Org. Nat. III. 265 One of the commonest species, the Baltimore Oriole,‥has received the name of fire-bird.‥ It is also called the Golden Robin.
1884 Harper's Mag. Mar. 610/1 Our New England forefathers call him the ‘blue robin’.
1905 Newark (Ohio) Advocate 2 June 4/3 The Japanese nightingale, or Pekin robin, is becoming naturalized in the parks of London.
1955 Sci. News Let. 23 Apr. 271 The towhee is a bird of many aliases. ‘Ground robin’ is a popular name, and justified by his deceptively robin-like appearance.
2004 T. Wheeler Falklands & S. Georgia 62 It's easy to see why the meadowlark, with its bright red breast, is known locally as the ‘robin’ or ‘military starling’.

---

The OED has this as

"3."

i.e. Use 3. To speak of "SENSE" 3 would beg the question (as Frege would have it).

"Chiefly North American: a large, migratory thrush, Turdus migratorius (family Turdidae), which has brick red underparts and a dark head, widespread and common in North America."

"Also more fully American robin."

The retronym then becomes the Old-World robin.

---

"Also (with distinguishing word): any of several similar American thrushes."

The interesting point is:

"Earlier in "robin redbreast" (see "robin redbreast" n. 2a)."

---- So, it's the "robin-redbreast" (description?) we should be aiming at.

CITES:

1703 S. Sewall Diary 16 Mar. (1973) I. 483 The Robbins cheerfully utter their Notes this morn.

---- We have analysed this. Sewall was born in Hampshire, England. So we expect he had seen European robins.

"The Robbins cheerfully utter their Notes this morn."

----- Most likely, he was aware of the earlier use, "robin redbreast". Seeing that the Turdus migratorius, like the European robin, both have redbreasts, he felt like shortening 'robin-redbreast' into 'robin'.

----- The ONLY philosophical point I was considering here was whether the utterer THOUGHT that what he had seen was a specimen of the same class as the European robin redbreast. Most likely, not. He just thought that 'Robbin' would be a good appellative.

---

Further quotes:

1750 J. Birket Voy. N. Amer. (1916) 13

"They have ... a bird like our field fare with a red brest which they call a Robin that sings delightfully."

This above is very complex. "They" call a robin. One wonders if the implicature is that "they" are wrong.

----

In any case, Birket NEVER explains WHY "they" call "a bird like our field fare with a red breast, too", 'a robin'. Most likely because it resembled the European robin.

--- At this point one wants to know the dates of the introduction of the scientific names (or not).

THIRD QUOTE:

1808 A. Wilson Amer. Ornithol. I. 37

"The Robin is one of our earliest songsters."

Here, alla Grice, to say, "The American Robin is one of our earliest songsters" would be too informative (redundant, even).

FOURTH QUOTE:

1858 H. W. Longfellow Miles Standish iii. 3

"Into the tranquil woods, where blue-birds and robins were building."

Odd that he would use 'blue-birds' but 'robins' rather than 'robin-redbreasts'.

---

FIFTH QUOTE:

1888 G. H. Kingsley in Field 16 June 869/2

"In America I shoot robins and find them thrushes."

Since Kingsley was English, I guess the implicature is that 'robin', qua American robin, is a misnomer. In England robins are NOT shot. So the mistake on the part of Kingsley is to shoot a robin. He should shoot a thrush and find a robin?

---

SIXTH quote:

1931 Times Lit. Suppl. 5 Nov. 859/3

"A lovely little bird hardly as large as an American robin."

--- not an ostrich, then.

SEVENTH quote:

1966 Vancouver Province 19 Nov. 1/5

"The robin had been sitting in a mountain ash tree in his front yard."

---- This is so late one wonders why the OED cares to quote it. Is it, like we are surprised people are STILL using 'robin' to mean the American thing?

EIGHTH quote:

1987 Field Guide Birds N. Amer. (National Geographic Soc.) (ed. 2) 330

Rufous-backed Robin. Turdus rufopalliatus.‥ Clay-colored Robin. Turdus grayi.

--- Interesting. We see that 'robin' then applies to 'turdus' per se. Interesting, this turns the 'redbreast' into an accidental rather than essential feature, in that we expect that neither the rufous-backed robin nor the clay-colored robin have redbreasts.

NINTH QUOTE:

1992 J. Osborne Cardinal i. 19

Some songbirds occasionally sing from the ground. The American Robin is one of these.

----- When is "The American robin" NOT a redundancy?

Then comes

USAGE 4.

a. Chiefly N. Amer.

"Any of various unrelated songbirds that resemble the European or American robin, esp. in having reddish or orange colour on the breast or underside."

"Usu. with distinguishing word.

blue, golden, ground, Pekin, swamp robin, etc.: see the first element.

So this gives:

blue robin
golden robin
ground robin
Pekin robin
swamp robin.

for which one is invited to check with 'blue', 'golden', etc.

Quotes:

1769 R. Smith Jrnl. 18 May in Tour Four Great Rivers (1906) 41

"The lively Note of the Swamp Robin, the Red Bird and other Birds from the earliest Dawn is entertaining."

1794 Philos. Soc. Trans. 4 110

"This bird was the chewink, or ground robin."

1855 Orr's Circle Sci., Org. Nat. III. 265

"One of the commonest species, the Baltimore Oriole,‥has received the name of fire-bird.‥ It is also called the Golden Robin."

1884 Harper's Mag. Mar. 610/1

"Our New England forefathers call him the ‘blue robin’."

1905 Newark (Ohio) Advocate 2 June 4/3

"The Japanese nightingale, or Pekin robin, is becoming naturalized in the parks of London."

1955 Sci. News Let. 23 Apr. 271

"The towhee is a bird of many aliases. ‘Ground robin’ is a popular name, and justified by his deceptively robin-like appearance."

---- THIS ABOVE IS INTERESTING. For my point is that Sewall was perhaps ALSO DECEIVED by the deceptive European-robin-like appearance of the North-American robin. Or not.

2004 T. Wheeler Falklands & S. Georgia 62

It's easy to see why the meadowlark, with its bright red breast, is known locally as the ‘robin’ or ‘military starling’.

A robin is a robin is a robin

2012-01-31T21:57:00.000-08:00

Speranza

From the OED below.
Cheers.

---

3. Chiefly N. Amer. A large, migratory thrush, Turdus migratorius (family Turdidae), which has brick red underparts and a dark head, widespread and common in North America. Also more fully American robin. Also (with distinguishing word): any of several similar American thrushes.Earlier in robin redbreast (see robin redbreast n. 2a).
1703 S. Sewall Diary 16 Mar. (1973) I. 483 The Robbins cheerfully utter their Notes this morn.
1750 J. Birket Voy. N. Amer. (1916) 13 They have‥a bird like our field fare with a red brest which they call a Robin that sings delightfully.
1808 A. Wilson Amer. Ornithol. I. 37 The Robin is one of our earliest songsters.
1858 H. W. Longfellow Miles Standish iii. 3 Into the tranquil woods, where blue-birds and robins were building.
1888 G. H. Kingsley in Field 16 June 869/2 In America I shoot robins and find them thrushes.
1931 Times Lit. Suppl. 5 Nov. 859/3 A lovely little bird hardly as large as an American robin.
1966 Vancouver Province 19 Nov. 1/5 The robin had been sitting in a mountain ash tree in his front yard.
1987 Field Guide Birds N. Amer. (National Geographic Soc.) (ed. 2) 330 Rufous-backed Robin. Turdus rufopalliatus.‥ Clay-colored Robin. Turdus grayi.
1992 J. Osborne Cardinal i. 19 Some songbirds occasionally sing from the ground. The American Robin is one of these.
1703—1992(Hide quotations)

4.
Categories »

a. Chiefly N. Amer. Any of various unrelated songbirds that resemble the European or American robin, esp. in having reddish or orange colour on the breast or underside. Usu. with distinguishing word.blue, golden, ground, Pekin, swamp robin, etc.: see the first element.
1769 R. Smith Jrnl. 18 May in Tour Four Great Rivers (1906) 41 The lively Note of the Swamp Robin, the Red Bird and other Birds from the earliest Dawn is entertaining.
1794 Philos. Soc. Trans. 4 110 This bird was the chewink, or ground robin.
1855 Orr's Circle Sci., Org. Nat. III. 265 One of the commonest species, the Baltimore Oriole,‥has received the name of fire-bird.‥ It is also called the Golden Robin.
1884 Harper's Mag. Mar. 610/1 Our New England forefathers call him the ‘blue robin’.
1905 Newark (Ohio) Advocate 2 June 4/3 The Japanese nightingale, or Pekin robin, is becoming naturalized in the parks of London.
1955 Sci. News Let. 23 Apr. 271 The towhee is a bird of many aliases. ‘Ground robin’ is a popular name, and justified by his deceptively robin-like appearance.
2004 T. Wheeler Falklands & S. Georgia 62 It's easy to see why the meadowlark, with its bright red breast, is known locally as the ‘robin’ or ‘military starling’.

Robbin Gets Baptised

2012-01-31T14:43:00.001-08:00

Speranza

On top of that, there's Kripke.

So that morn of March 16, 1703,

Sewall said,

"The Robbins cheerfully utter their Notes this morn."

He was _naming_ the Turdus migratorius "Robbin" (now spelt "Robin") and he *knew* it.

---

It is still different with Chaucer:

C. Riggs:

"I found a 1374 Chaucerian reference for Robin in my OED. I'll get more
detail if you like, but now it is time for tea."

-- For the use of 'Robin' to mean the Old World (as I prefer) thing (Erithacus rubecula, if you mustn'nt) is fanciful in nature (or something).

A robin is a robin is a robin

2012-01-31T14:40:00.000-08:00

Speranza

Putnam would speak of division of labour.

J. Friedman notes that there is one use of "robin" for the American bird from 1792. This is in /The American Geography/, by Jedidiah Morse.

http://books.google.com/books?id=PUcMAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA59

Friedman comments:

"Morse is not what you'd call reliable on natural history."

---- And one wonders if he was quoting Sewall. He couldn't. Because Sewall's Diary only got published in the 1800s.

So, there are two paths to consider here. Or not. Or more.

"The Robbins cheerfully utter their Notes this morn" -- Samuel Sewall, "Diary" -- March 16, 1703.

2012-01-31T14:32:00.000-08:00

Speranza

---

Sewall, Samuel. Born: 1652 AD. Died: 1730 AD, at 77 years of age. Nationality: American Categories: Abolitionist. 1652 - Born at Hampshire, England on the 28th of March. 1661 - He emigrated from England to the Massachusetts colony. 1692 - He also entered local politics, and was elevated to the judiciary that judged the people in Salem accused of witchcraft. 1730 - Died in Boston, Massachusetts on the 1st of January.

1703 S. SEWALL Diary 16 Mar. (1879) II. 75

The Robbins cheerfully utter their Notes this morn.

Seeing that Sewall was Hampshire (rather than New Hampshire) born, I would think that he perhaps thought that the 'robbins' that he heard as "cheerfully uttering their notes" that morn of March 16, 1703 -- when he was:

1703
- 1652
---

at age 51

He was 51.

He heard, rather than saw the things, and said, to his diary (cfr. Grice on 'utterer's meaning in the absence of an audience" -- diary writing):

"The Robbins cheerfully utter their Notes this morn."

We can assume that he was familiar with

robin = Eritacus rubecula.

(Possibly, Sewall would spell that 'robbin').

So, for Sewall there's

'robbin'---> the "Erithacus rubecula"

and

"the Robbins cheerfully utter their Notes this morn."

---- He could NOT have thought that those were specimens of Eritacus rubecula. So perhaps he was wrong.

A robin is a robin is a robin -- Sewall 1703

2012-01-31T14:19:00.000-08:00

Speranza

The sources expanded:

OED antedating for "robin" (American bird)

From: trio@xxxxxxxxxx (Donna Richoux)
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:30:35 +0100
Peter Duncanson (BrE) wrote:
On Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:24:25 -0800 (PST), "jerry_friedman@xxxxxxxxx"
wrote:

Me again. "Chickadee" led me to "robin" -- the real one, not that tiny
Rightpondian impostor.

Does anyone feel like checking whether the OED on line or other sources has anything before 1798?

OED:
Robin

1

3. N. Amer. The red-breasted thrush, Turdus migratorius.

FIRST CITE:

1703
S. SEWALL
"Diary" 16 Mar. (published in 1879)
II. 75

"The Robbins cheerfully utter their Notes this morn."

---

NEXT QUOTE:

1798 Monthly Mag. May 331/2

"The American robin, larger than ours."

The "Dictionary of American English", vol. 4 (Chicago, 1944) defines
"robin" as "a large-red-breasted thrush, Turdus (syn. Merula)
migratorius."

Citations begin with the Sewall 1703, then Fithian 1774
and Wilson 1808.

So the order here should be:

Sewall 1703 "The Robbins cheerfully utter their Notes this morn."
Fithian 1774
1798 -- "The American robin, larger than ours."

A separate quotation refers to the practice of hunting
and eating robins, beginning with:

1759 Essex Inst. Coll.
"Supped on Robens which my Chum and Wingate killed."

[Followed by 1775, 1805, and more.]

"Do I see a serious attempt to force the OED to document all American
usage?"

"They have a rather patchy track-record there." (Donna Richoux).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

•From: "jerry_friedman@xxxxxxxxx"
•Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:54:47 -0800 (PST)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Nov 25, 9:30 am, t...@xxxxxxxxxx (Donna Richoux) wrote:

Peter Duncanson (BrE) wrote:

I've just discovered that there's one of those in a library about
half a mile from my house.

The Am. Dict. defines
"robin" as "a large-red-breasted thrush, Turdus (syn. Merula)
migratorius." Citations begin with the Sewall 1703, then Fithian 1774
and Wilson 1808. A separate quotation refers to the practice of hunting
and eating robins, beginning with:

1759 Essex Inst. Coll. Supped on Robens which my Chum and Wingate
killed. [Followed by 1775, 1805, and more.]

....

Jerry Friedman:

"Thanks to both! So much for antedating this time. If it's of any interest, none of the citations above are in Goo Boo."

"There are two uses of "robin" for the American bird from 1792."

"One is in "The American Geography", by Jedidiah Morse.

http://books.google.com/books?id=PUcMAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA59

Morse is not what you'd call reliable on natural history.

The other is "The History of New-Hampshire", volume III, by Jeremy
Belknap.

http://books.google.com/books?id=rzIBAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA172

"Some of his vernacular names are charming:

"hang bird" (Orchard Oriole, which builds a hanging nest?), "little hang-bird" (Northern
Parula, ditto?), "tom teet" (Black-capped Chickadee), and my favorite,
"humility" (Ruddy Turnstone?)."

"But the earliest one is from 1789: "Cultivation of the Vine", by
Edward Antill, from /Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society."

http://books.google.com/books?id=LbgAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA230

"I think I checked all the earlier hits on "robin" at Goo Boo, but I
might have been careless, or they might have an OCR error."

Jerry Friedman:

"I'm not going to search for "robbin" right at the moment."

"I checked to see whether S. Sewall was writing from an American perspective
and found:
http://www.s9.com/Biography/Sewall-Samuel
Sewall, Samuel
Born: 1652 AD
Died: 1730 AD, at 77 years of age.
Nationality: American
Categories: Abolitionist
1652 - Born at Hampshire, England on the 28th of March.
1661 - He emigrated from England to the Massachusetts colony.
1692 - He also entered local politics, and was elevated to the judiciary
that judged the people in Salem accused of witchcraft.
1730 - Died in Boston, Massachusetts on the 1st of January.
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)

OED antedating for robin

2012-01-31T14:18:00.000-08:00

A robin is a robin is a robin.

Two online links:

Re: OED antedating for "robin" (American bird) - Derkeiler.comnewsgroups.derkeiler.com › ... › 2008-11En caché - Traducir esta página
Haz hecho público que te gusta. Deshacer
25 Nov 2008 – The red-breasted thrush, Turdus migratorius. ... May 331/2 The American robin, ... ... Citations begin with the Sewall 1703, then Fithian 1774 ...
Re: OED antedating for "robin" (American bird) - Derkeiler.comnewsgroups.derkeiler.com › ... › 2008-11En caché - Traducir esta página
Haz hecho público que te gusta. Deshacer
25 Nov 2008 – The red-breasted thrush, Turdus migratorius. 1703 S. SEWALL Diary 16 Mar. ( 1879) II. 75 The Robbins cheerfully utter their Notes this morn. ...

A robin is a robin is a robin: 1703 and beyond

2012-01-31T14:16:00.001-08:00

Speranza

---

From another online source:

"In N.Amer., the name was applied to the red-breasted
thrush by 1703."

The above is slightly interesting in that 'red-breasted thrush' sounds like a more technical thing.

Note that 'robin' is for "Robert", which for Frege, but not Mill, would have no sense, but just reference. (Cfr. Alice, "Must a name mean anything? -- this club and beyond).

A robin is a robin is a robin

2012-01-31T14:12:00.000-08:00

Speranza

---

From wiki:

"The term 'robin' for this species has been recorded since at least 1703. Simpson, E. Weiner (eds), ed (1989). "Robin". Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-861186-2.

"A robin": a tribute to Michael Dummett

2012-01-31T13:55:00.000-08:00

Speranza

The illustration above, which I extracted from

http://media-3.web.britannica.com/eb-media/05/25905-004-E47C9B39.jpg

shows, as per the caption:

>scarlet robin: scarlet robin, European robin, and American robin

Strictly, a better caption, below the figure, reads:

"(Top) Scarlet robin (Petroica multicolor), (middle) European robin (Erithacus rubecula), (bottom) American robin (Turdus migratorius).

--- and there's quite a bit as to how to cite this.

INTERLUDE. How to cite this.

-- begin quoted text:

Credit Murrell Butler/EB Inc.
Links
•American robin (bird)
•European robin (bird)
•robin (bird)
•scarlet robin (bird)

Citations

MLA style:

scarlet robin: scarlet robin, European robin, and American robin. Art. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Web. 31 Jan. 2012. .

APA style:

scarlet robin: scarlet robin, European robin, and American robin. [Art]. In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/media/7156/Scarlet-robin-European-robin-American-robin

Harvard style:

scarlet robin: scarlet robin, European robin, and American robin. [Art]. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 31 January 2012, from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/media/7156/Scarlet-robin-European-robin-American-robin

Chicago Manual of Style:

scarlet robin: scarlet robin, European robin, and American robin, Art, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online, accessed January 31, 2012, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/media/7156/Scarlet-robin-European-robin-American-robin

--- end cited text. I'll stick with:

scarlet robin, European robin, and American robin.

To credit Frege, I would go with this other caption, too:

"European robin (Erithacus rubecula), ... American robin (Turdus migratorius)."

----

A Griceian scenario.

What I was wondering, seeing that the birds (the European, so-called, robin) and the American (so-called) robin, are pretty different...

The first spotter of an American robin must have said:

"A robin!"

----

My point -- Griceian -- is that he (the utterer) did think that this was a robin.

Indeed, it is.

Yet, it is not a

Erithacus-rubecula, but a Turdus-migratorius.

It is best to approach

"Erithacus-rubecula" and "Turdus-migratorius"

as complex names, alla Frege. Surely, 'robin' is _also_ a name, yet less complex (but cfr. "Robin Hood", now a complex name).

So, the scenarios are different:

A Linneaus-type genealogist, travelling to America: "That is a bird which I will refer to as 'a robin'. Not because it is a robin, in the _Fregean_ sense of "Erithacus-rubecula" but because, ... well, just because."

----

If the utterer did think that the Turdus-migratorius was an Erithacus-rubecula, surely the correct thing for him to say, under the circumstances, was:

"That's a robin".

---- Since he perhaps did not spot a big difference. Note that the complete name is "robin redbreast". And both the Erithacus-rubecula and the Turdus-migratorius have a red-breast (And since 'robin' is so fancy, why kant the name be used, with a different sense (and of course, reference) to two birds?).

And so on.

----

Next would be to doublecheck sources for this. Or not!

---

Cheers!

The Izz and the Hazz, the Deep and the Shallow

2012-01-23T06:45:00.001-08:00

Speranza

Jones was sharing some material in phil-logic, which I quote below.

Jones is interested in the

necessary-contingent distinction

as it parallels the

analytic-synthetic distinction

and how this touches on

Grice's izz-hazz distinction.

On top of that, I brought Kripke into the picture, with Kripke's examples of

Socrates

Socrates is

Socrates is called "Socrates"

and so on.

Kripke jokes:

"See how high the seas of language can rise. And
at the lowest points, too."

----

The "lowest points" I identified with what Grice calls the 'shallow' almost, "BERTHS" of language -- the Grice manuscript reads, "deep berths". For Grice there are deep berths and shallow berths. If he mentions Long. and Lat. elsewhere, here he mentions depth. He was a sailor at heart.

----

I would suggest that he saw necessity and analyticity as dealing with the deepest berths (which are at premium, and thus beyond controversy/denial/doubt -- they constitute 'knowledge').

---

On the other hand, Jones is considering both 'mathematical' and other types of 'knowledge'. I would think that Grice (like me) never considered science (empirical science) as a matter of 'necessity'.

In "Aspects of Reason" he mentions, as a joke, the idea of

ichthyological necessity.

He is considering uses of 'must'. He wants to say, "You must not kill" and "what goes up must come down". Surely, there are NO two senses -- one 'alethic', one 'practical' -- of "must". There is a Thesis of AEQUI-vocality, as he calls it. It's the same vox ('must') that allows for the different uses. Similarly, here the joke, it would be otiose to think of the necessity of fish.

"Ichthyological necessity".

---

We should provide some generalisations in empirical science about fish, and find what's allegedly necessary about them. Nothing! But perhaps what a fish izz is not what a fish hazz.

---

Here below some running commentary on some material by Jones elsewhere that may relate:

Jones recalls his source hre:

"This is in fact close to my point of entry into Aristotle. My interest was provoked by [...] [a] version of set of semi-formal principles formulated by Code following his collaboration with Grice on some Aristotelian studies. Grice was interested inter alia in "the multiplicity of being", i.e. in whether the verb "to be" has many different or one single "sense". In this connection Grice coined two words to unambiguously express essential and accidental predication, viz: "izz" and "hazz"."

Jones goes on to point out that

"[his -- i.e. Jones'] formal treatment of the Aristotelian syllogism"

and the points regarding

"predication in Aristotle's philosophy",

to wit,

that

"affirmative propositions carry existential import and that
there is no presumption of non-emptyness of the extension of
terms."

Jones notes that in view of this,

"the theory of the syllogism is in need of
modification once Aristotle's distinction between essential
and accidental predication (as given in the Metaphysics
rather than the Categories) is taken into account."

Jones then brings Maritain into account.

For Maritain,

"the existential import is associated with
affirmative propositions only if they are accidental, not if
they are essential."

Jones comments:

"[Maritain] does not seem to be offering any way in which we can
discover whether a proposition is essential or accidental,
and this characteristic is shown in his examples by
parenthetical remarks, suggesting that in the absence of
these remarks there is material ambiguity on this point.
This seems to me quite a radical departure from anything I
have previously seen suggested about Aristotle's
syllogistic, and so naturally, in default of textual
evidence (which in the passage in Maritain [...] is
not conspicuous) I would have to suspend judgement on it."

Jones goes on:

"At some point I did intend to produce a better combined
partial model of the syllogistic with accidental and
essential predication, since I wanted to remove the
presumption of non-emptyness in the terms."

"Prior to reading Maritain I would have done this by instead
attaching existential import to affirmative propositions,
irrespective of whether they are accidental."

"If I believed Maritain then I would have to do this
exclusively for accidental predication, and I would have to
do something different for essential predication, withdrawing
existential import from both universal and particular
essential predications."

Jones then goes to consider

Some A is B

A = B

Some A is A.

Jones rewrites this, as it

"seems to correspond to my reading of
Maritain, which can be rendered in Gricean terminology by
saying that:

All A izz A

and

Some A izz A

are necessary truths, but

All A hazz A

and

Some A hazz A

will be at best contingently true, if an A contingently
exists."

Jones notes:

"The question then arises whether this reading can be shown
to be true to Aristotle."

Jones is

"looking for specific refences in the contemporary
secondary literature which explain the relevant Aristotelian
doctrines, preferably with appropriate detailed references
to the Aristotelian texts."

A mention of

Terence Parsons

--- cited by Grice in "Vacuous Names" --

incidentally, was

"was enough for [Jones] to find on
his web site a description of Aristotle's syllogism which was
clear on the required points"

For the record, the site to Aristotle's work at

http://texts.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/classics/aristotl/o1110c.htm#18

As we provide the Aristotle quotes...

Part of this is Greek (to me).

Grice (his wife would confess) complained that Berkeley students could read no Greek. Grice was already suffering that in Oxford.

In the Oxford of Grice's youthful days, NO ENGLISH translation of Aristotle was necessary. Loeb -- we love Loeb -- Loeb is all you need -- is a charm, but it was not Loeb's Aristotle that Oxonians were reading. They were dealing with the Oxford Aristotle -- in Greek only.

By the time Grice was tutoring in Oxford, he happened to have J. L. Ackrill as one of his students. Ackrill will go on to translate Aristotle into Greek. The sad thing is that Oxford would then go on to publish Aristotle _in English only_! (In the preface, Acrkill credits Grice -- and Austin, his other tutor).

----

So, when discussing Aristotle quotes, we have to consider the 'deep berths' of Greek syntax, too.

Recall that

"All A izz A"

"Some A izz A"

"Some A hazz B"

then become things to consider.

Recall that the Greeks, from what I recall, also use things like 'ekhein' (to have), and perhaps things like 'participate'.

--- So we should start with predication as a syntactic phenomenon.

Surely the Square of Opposition, as set by Aristotle, is a basic thing. But we should also be careful when we deal with 'singular terms' (not a Greek notion) like "Socrates".

The examples by Aristotle do involve

"Socrates"

and

"white".

"Socrates laughs".

"Socrates is rational"

"Socrates is mortal"

"MEN are mortal".

"Men laugh."

----- Consider 'to idion'. What is proper (Latin proprium). This FOLLOWS from a necessary predication, but is not necessary itself.

Then there's the 'qua'.

This particle Aristotle uses. Aristotle did not care much for 'ordinary language'. In fact, Grice would say that, like Austin, or Grice himself, Aristotle felt the need to 'work' on the ordinary language and come up with concoctions like 'implicature' or 'performative'. In the case of Aristotle, the

'qua'

-- in Greek, 'e' --

we have a dative case formation.

"Socrates, qua man, is mortal."

But consider

"Plato".

"I was reading Plato".

In this case,

"Plato, qua man, was NOT what I was reading."

Plato can refer to something resembling a world-3 construction by Popper. The THOUGHTS of Plato, say, rather than Plato qua res extensa. More like 'res cogitans'. And so on.

-----

The point about Grice's "deep berths" reappear, more superficially, in his "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" -- In fact, in "Indicative Conditionals" and "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature", and Jones may examine this.

Grice, indeed following Terence Parsons, considers the square-bracket device:

Some A izz A
Some A hazz A

as

[Some A] izz A
[Some A] hazz A

The point is to consider things like

"My aunt's cousin went to that concert"

as

[My aunt's cousin] went to that concert.

In the "Oxford philosophy" notes (MS, Grice collection) where he speaks of 'deep berths', he is considering the syntax of predication. If there is such a thing like 'knowledge', it would correspond to those things which we cannot challenge. We are anchored to them; deep berths are at a premium.

----

Grice, in his more colloquial parlance, considers what it would be a 'conversation without' THAT type of logic -- where EVERYTHING can be doubted or denied.

Recall that his:

Tweetie: "That looks like a big black cat to me."

---- should only project the implicature of 'doubt or denial' (D-or-D, in the parlance of "Causal theory").

In "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" he has A and B:

A: Lovely concert.
B: I agree.
A: You went?
B: No. Not me. My aunt's cousin did.

"It is quite natural to say to somebody,
when we are discussing some concert,
"My aunt's cousin went to that concert,"
when we know perfectly well that the
person we are talking to is very likely
not even to know that we have an aunt,
let alone know that our aunt has a cousin.
So the supposition must be not that
it is common _knowledge_ but rather that
it is _noncontroversial_, in the sense
that it is something that we would
expect the hearer to take from us
(if he does not already know). That is to
say, I do not expect, when I tell
someone that my aunt's cousin went
to a concert, to be QUESTIONED whether
I have an aunt, and if so, whether
my aunt has a cousin."

---

Here Grice is then, mutatis mutandis, considering the non-emptyness of classes.

The class

"My aunt"

the class

"my aunt's cousin".

This is in the context of

"The Loyalty Examiner won't be summoning you."

(WoW: 271).

In this case the square-bracket status

[There is a loyalty examiner]

is cancelled, qua implicature that it was.

This is what Grice calls a 'contextual cancellation':

---

An implication regarding the non-emptyness of the subject-class

"seems to be", on occasion, "contextually cancellable, that is
cancellable by circumstances attending the utterance [of a
negative S-P sentence, The S is not P.].

"If it is a matter of dispute whether the
Government has a very undercover person who
interrogates those whose loyalty is
suspect, and who, IF HE EXISTED, could
be legitimately referred to as "The Loyalty
Examiner"; and if, further, I am KNOWN to be
very sceptical about the existence of such
a person, I could _perfectly well_ say to a
plainly loyal person,

"Well, the loyalty examiner won't be
summoning you, at any rate."

--- "without, I would think, being taken to
IMPLY that such a person exists."

----

This then relates with commentary by Jones, elsewhere, along the lines of:

"Marmaduke Bloggs won't be at the party."
--- "Well, he doesn't exist."
--- "That's what I mean. When I use "There is", I don't implicate the things I do when I say, "There exists"."

And so on.

And so on.

-----

It is in "Vacuous Names" that Grice quotes from Parsons, and indeed Boolos and Myro and Mates. This in the context of Quine, but surely the point can be extended to cover Aristotle.

Strawson, for example, never understood Quine, and thought him otiose. Strawson would rather play with Aristotle _for hours_, if indeed _not years_. Predication in Aristotle, or Kantotle, if you mustn't, is Grice's essential game.
Or something.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Grice, The "Deep Berths"

2012-01-21T16:45:00.001-08:00

Speranza

--- vide Grice, "Philosophy at Oxford 1945-1970", The Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

The Deep Berths of Language

2012-01-21T16:10:00.001-08:00

--- To izz or not to izz, that hazz the question.

Grice's reply to Kripke's irreverential:

"See how high the seas of language can rise. And at the lowest points, too."

Speranza

Jones, in "Izz", etc., writes:

"Without as yet actually using Grice's words (though I might well put them in soon), the subject matter of Grice's work on predication in Aristotle is one of the topics under discussion at the moment on the phil-logic@philo.at mailing list. It may not be a favourite haunt of Grice club denizens (Grice doesn't often get a mention) but I thought it worth a mention."

Thanks for _that_!

--

Jones:

"In my own formal work partly inspired by the Grice/Code collaboration I combined formal models of essential and accidental predication (izzing and hazzing in Grice's terms) with the syllogistic logic. In doing so, my preliminary conclusions were that once you bring in that distinction (which seems to originate rather in Aristotle's metaphysics than his organon), then the rules of the syllogism become more complex, the usual conception of validity not being reflected fully for all kinds of predication."

Excellent points.

"Grice's interest seems to have been at least partly in multiplicity of "being", the question whether that verb has more than one sense. Izzing and Hazzing are different names to distinguish two ways in which "being" (and some other words like "having") are used, the neologism being useful because the distinction between essential and accidental predication (as this is conceived by Aristotle) is not in ordinary language consistently conveyed by distinct vocabulary."

Indeed. In other languages, it may even be inexistent. (I have not checked this. I would not be surprised if in some aboriginal -- i.e. there from the origins -- language (or 'lingo' as Kant says) there is no word for 'is': "Your letter, sir" -- the butler says. Surely it would be redundant to add, "Here IS your letter, sir".). Note that in classical Latin, 'est' is also omitted:

Tu quoque.

"You, too" -- surely "are".

---

One may wonder why the _need_ for 'is'. Recall that in Aristotelian logic,

"S est P"

but, as Aristotle argued, and Kant, too, 'is' (the copula) is "NOT" a predicate.

--- And so on.

Jones:

"Grice I believe was inclined to question that multiple senses really are involved, and the question arises by what criteria one can judge whether observed usage constitutes a single or multiple senses. On this I remain at present, much less than adequately acquainted with Grice's position, but there is one possible criterion which now occurs to me as a result of material on phil-logic."

Lovely always to have the cross-references!

Jones:

"It seems that there may be differences in Aristotle's conception of the ontological commitments implicit in affirmative propositions according to whether they involve essential or accidental predication, and hence differences in truth conditions.
The idea is that an accidental universal affirmation does entail existence, whereas an essential one does not. I am still not clear on whether this is the case, but if it were and the truth conditions do vary in such a manner, then it is hard to see how these two kinds of predication could avoid being distinguished as different senses."

--- Personally (I hate this redundancy) I'm not too sure that's the case.

We can consider Grice's ("Descartes" essay, WoW) example:

"I think; therefore I am".

---- By contraposition, this becomes Speranza's dictum:

"I am; therefore I think" (echoes of my uncle)

---

Grice's 'izz' and 'hazz' have (is?) the incovenience that it's not meant for first-person, surely the most important person (to some).

I suggest then, to reformulate:

I am; therefore, I think.

As:

Speranza IZZ; therefore Speranza HAZZ thought.

Or something.

Jones is suggesting taht to say that

"Speranza hazz thought" is _accidental_, or an accidental thing to say. Whereas to say that God (rather than Speranza) _IZZ_ would be, again in someone's parlance, _essential_ (or an essential thing to say). But I disgress.

Jones:

"Could one plausibly argue against the "multiplicity of being" if it were once established that there is a multiplicity of truth conditions?"

Yes. But perhaps we should bring Kripke in:

Kripke wrote:

'the seas of language'.

Dummett found that funny and entitled his odd collection of this and that, "The seas of language". Kripke considers things like:

Socrates is white.
Socrates has a big nose (Socrates "hazz" a big, flat, nose, in Grice's spelling).
Socrates is called "Socrates".

Of the latter, Kripke said:

"Actually sentences like 'Socrates is called "Socrates"' are very interesting and one can spend, strange as it may seem, hours talking about their analysis. I actually did, once, do that. I won't do that, however, on this occasion. (See how high the seas of language can rise. And at the lowest points, too.)"

And Kripke should possibly be quoting from Grice, unless he isn't (Determinists find, I read, counterfactual thinking a hard thing to engage in). For Grice wrote:

The source here is interesting enough and the keyword:

the 'deep berths' of language

KEYWORD: deep berths

---

Quote:

Grice, H. P. "Philosophy at Oxford 1945-1970", in The Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135c. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

---

Grice is attempting to reconcile the Oxford 'school' of philosophy (as he never named it) with Aristotle's idea that philosophy is about the nature of things (to use the title of a book by Lord Quinton) , rather than language.

Grice proposes to adopt the _hypothesis_ that OPINION (Greek 'doxa') is generally reflected in language ("ta legomena").

But this is done with different 'levels' (Grice's word) representing differents degrees of commitment.

Some aspects of 'knowledge' receive the DEEPEST levels of embedding within (even) SYNTAX.

This aspects of knowledge then reside in what Grice describes, indeed, as the 'DEEP BERTHS' of language.

It is not possible, Grice suggests, for an utterer to use a language such as English WITHOUT BEING committed to (or anchored in) these 'deep berths' of language.

----

The DEEPEST levels are at a premium. So, it is in the interests of utterers (within population speaking Lingo L) to reserve these deepest levels (the "deep berths" of language), naturally enough, to their deepest commitments.

---

Other people MIGHT challenge this, Grice suggests, but it would DANGEROUS to do so. If we subscribe to this account, we might be tempted to argue that 'first principles' of 'knowledge' (as it were) are to be found in the deep categorial, syntactic even, structure of this or that lingo, rather than, say, in the VOCABULARY of a given language ("is" as categorial: "izz" and "hazz" as its representations).

Grice writes:

'[H]ow w talk OUGHT [emphasis Grice's -- in his
usual underlining] to reflect our most
solid, cherished and generally accepted
opinions'.

(Grice, op. cit.).

---

In this discussion of what is presented as 'uncontroversial', say, and what is, rather, available for 'denial', Grice might be described as interested in the ways in which different syntactic (as it were -- in Gentzen's sense) devices are available for conveying 'information' (or 'knowledge', if you mustn't) bring with them different 'existential' or 'ontological' commitments, if you mustn't.

And so on.

But back to Kripke:

Socrates: I am, therefore, I think (NON-SEQUITUR).

I think; therefore I am.

Socrates thinks.
Socrates is.
Socrates izz
Socrtaes is a thinking being.
Socrates, on top of that, is called (IZZ called, HAZZ called) "Socrates".

What is essential? What is not?

Kripke:

"Actually sentences like 'Socrates is called "Socrates"'
are very interesting and one can spend, strange
as it may seem, hours talking
about their analysis. I actually
did, once, do that. I won't do that,
however, on this occasion. (See
how high the seas of language can
rise. And at the lowest points,
too.)"

----

Perhaps Grice was too much of a sailor (as Kripke ain't) and went straight to the deepest berths, as perhaps he shouldn't ('have' or 'izz'). And so on.

Grice on dthis and dthat

2012-01-21T15:38:00.001-08:00

Speranza

Jones writes in "Maggee", etc.

"I am always interested in critiques of one man's analytic philosophy in the terms of another's. And also in the dispossessed or marginalised, those who might possibly have become academic philosophers had not their philosophical inclinations been too far removed from the prevailing orthodoxy of their day or whose philosophy was conducted in some more liberal context sheltered from the critical gaze of the principle centers of analytic orthodoxy. In that category I count Gellner, Berlin, and Magee, possibly Murdoch and in all of these cases the orthodoxy of their youth was probably "linguistic philosophy". Why not Popper, Lakatos, ...? In these terms perhaps LSE is a haven for philosophical unorthodoxy. Well I don't feel that Popper and Lakatos were marginalised. Perhaps it's just an Oxford thing I am groping at, since Gellner, Berlin, Magee and Murdoch were all in some way dissenting Oxonians."

Too true.

--- Keyword: ALWAYS (or all-ways, as I prefer) Oxford.

Jones:

"It had not occurred to me that Dummett should be thought outside the fold of linguistic philosophy until Speranza's recent postings about his critical attitude towards Austin. I suppose to make sense of this we must distinguish between "linguistic philosophy" and "ordinary language philosophy", and say that Dummett may not have been an "ordinary language philosopher" but he was certainly a linguistic philosopher."

Too true. It is fun to see how his books are 'catalogued' by the British library, say, or the Library of (the American) congress. "Philosophy of Language". I would think the serious keyword here is:

'philosophy of Language' -- but this is tricky, since "Philosophy of X" is "ALL-ways" second-rate when it comes to philosophical methodology: "Metaphysics" is fine, but "he was a philosopher of language" cannot be complimenary -- ever.

Jones goes on:

"[Dummett] was a linguistic philosopher because he gave primacy to philosophy of language, and because he seems to have subscribed to a point of view which Magee singled out for especially thorough refutation in his "confessions of a philosopher".
If we take this view (which I will explain shortly) then we can see Grice's philosophy as moderating not only the extremes of Austinian ordinary language philosophy, but also the extreme of linguistic philosophy which Dummett inhabited."

Good. Will check this out!

Jones:

"The doctrine which Magee singled out for special obloquy is the argument for the primacy of linguistic philosophy on the grounds that thought is essentially linguistic."

Mmm. Echoes of Peacocke?

I treasure a little chapter, by Peacocke, somewhere, "Thought and Language" (or "Language and Thought" -- I never recall).

Jones:

"When we sit silently chewing the cud, the argument goes, our thinking is a stream of bits of language which we just happen to refrain from articulating.
Since all thought consists of propositions expressed or repressed, the philosophy of language has prime place, and a study of language is an essential part of any philosophical enterprise. This is a doctrine which Dummett does explicitly subscribe to, somewhere, perhaps in his "Is analytic philosophy systematic and should it be?"."

Echoes of that UNPUBLISHED lecture by Grice -- for years. The very last "William James" lecture on "Logic and Conversation" (WoW:vi). It's all about the alleged primacy of "mean" (meaning) -- Grice's prefered locution -- over thought, or vice versa.

---

Jones:

"Dummett also at least some of the time, and particularly in his attempt to provide a philosophical justification for intuitionistic logic. The analogous caricature of Austinian ordinary language philosophy would be that philosophy is just the study of ordinary language, and the advancement of our understanding of this instrument through a detailed analysis of its use. This nominally as a prelude to the resolution of extra-linguistic philosophical problems. This seems to be the line in Austin's "A Plea for Excuses", which is his most explicit metaphilosophical pronouncement. The Austin of "Sense and Sensibilia" is using observations about ordinary language in a critique of a philosophical argument concerning a problem which is not itself purely linguistic. But the Austin of "Doing things with words" seems to have moved on from criticising a philosophical position to practicing a new kind of philosophy consisting primarily or exclusively in the study of language through its non philosophical manifestations."

Indeed. There probably is more continuity in Austin's thought (I love that: 'the continuity of ...' -- e.g. "The continuity of Middle English philosophy from Beowulf") than his manuscripts suggest.

Recall that "How to do things with words" was never thought by Austin to be published. Urmson did that for him! And on top of that, Oxford engaged Marina Sbisa to finish the thing! ---- The "Sense and sensibilia" was, also, never meant for publication by Austin. Warnock did that for Austin, since Warnock's ego moved Warnock to have Austin's discussion of Warnock in the latter lectures (Austin focuses on Warnock's booklet on Berkeley).

I think there is a lot of continuity in Austin's oeuvre, as there is in Grice's oeuvre, but we have to consider, almost, year-by-year dating of publications and unpublications, and separate the 'public' Austin from the more personal philosophical Austin, and so on. I'm pleased I'm not an Austinian, or else this would be the Austin Club (or something).

Jones:

"My impression is that Grice doesn't himself fit in with either of these extremes.
His essay on philosophical method and ordinary language in WOW suggests: firstly, that philosophical analysis is a kind of conceptual analysis (which surprises me a little, I would not have thought that consistent with the whole of his philosophical output); secondly, the assertion of an "unswerving association" of philosophy with the study not just of language but of "ordinary language""

What a beautiful word.

--- begin quoted text:

swever, early 13c., "to depart, make off;" early 14c., "to turn aside, deviate from a straight course," probably from O.E. sweorfan "to rub, scour, file" (but sense development is difficult to trace), from P.Gmc. *swerbanan (cf O.N. sverfa "to scour, file," O.S. swebran "to wipe off"), from PIE base *swerbh-. Cognate words in other Germanic languages (cf. O.Fris. swerva "to creep," M.Du. swerven "to rove, stray") suggests the sense of "go off, turn aside" may have existed in O.E., though unrecorded. The noun is recorded from 1741.

---

Jones:

"But an association is not an identification, so there is some softening there. Grice associates the opposition to this point of view (thinking of Russell and Quine) with "scientism". This critique is probably even more applicable to Rudolf Carnap"

--- intersting. Grice will re-quote "Scientism" later in his "Method" -- by this time, it has become "The devil of Scientism" (big quote repeated elsewhere, etc.).

Jones:

"[This critique is probably even more applicable to Rudolf Carnap] who, because of his dedication to the formalisation of science and his conception of science as encompassing all systematic study of empirical or synthetic truth, does at least regard the study of ordinary language as empirical science (and the kind of philosophy which he practiced as a deductive/demonstrative science insofar as it establishes new truths rather than proposing new languages and methods)."

Interesting. There are various points here:

---- I would associate Carnap indeed with that grand movement, American in spirit, apparently, of the "Unified science".

--- the other point is sublter. When I was studying kewords, I made a distinction between

philosophical linguistics

and

linguistic philosophy.

Indeed, 'philosophical linguistics' seems oxymoronic, since, since Saussure, linguists have NOT been _too_ philosophical. By registering Carnap's attitude towards things such as 'pragmatics' as the empirical study of assertion and belief, say, in that little essay that we have discussed elsewhere with Jones, Carnap seems to be minimising linguistics, and linguistic philosophy (into the bargain) so! I don't mind about his minimising empirical linguistics (I guess) --. But then I would disagree that what Austin or Grice are doing is 'empirical' linguistics alla Naess. They are more into Kantotelian linguistics. For Austin (and more so for Grice) the study of language is important because it is a study of _categories_. And categories can come in ontological, cognitive, AND linguistic format.

---
SOME empirical linguists (notably Whorf) emphasised this. But others (notably Chomsky and his followers, such as some of the early Griceains) did not, and rather stuck with relative paradigms of a given language AS if they were universalia, without knowing (or something like that).

Jones:

"Sorry, I think I must have lost my thread. I am trying to get a better handle quite generally on the kinds of philosophical analysis which have been proposed or practiced and their relationships, which seems like an enterprise of unending complexity, since it is in the nature of philosophy not only that no two philosophers share a common philosophy, but probably also that no two share the same conception of what philosophy is or how it should be done. Making an illuminating story out of this (which is what I am trying to do) is a bit of a challenge, and I am interested especially in how my own limited conception of 20th Century philosophy looks wrong to others (particularly in how it exposes my extensive ignorance!)."

Not at all. It's very simple! You love to make things complicated, which I love!

-----

("It's very simple!" is an utterance of utter complexity).

It all starts with the first Witters. (When philosophers engage to discuss the history of 20th century philosophy -- they HAVE to mention Witters). His "Tractatus". This is ONE language. Then there's the second Witters: the USES of language.

Then there's the Unified Science Movement. Carnap noted one big complication of this: physicalism versus phenomenalism. Given the complexities of quantum physics, say, why bother to formalise, in first-order predicate calculus, what physicists are saying? They may not even know it (Echoes of Dummett: "metaphysics is an examination of the philosophy of physics").

Then comes Austin. It is best to understand Austin in terms of how philosophy (how BORINGLY) philosophy was conducted in Oxford before he came. Try to read any pre-Austinian philosopher! They are just impossible! -- Bradley, Prichard (realism), Cook Wilson. Big words! Big manifestos. Ryle softened this a bit, with his irreverencies. But Austin set the thing _on fire_. He thought: 'let us focus on how 'know' works -- perhaps it works 'performatively', as I might say'. And so on. His students were FASCINATED (except Dummett, -- and the female philosophers Murdoch and Anscombe).

Austin exerted a fascination NOT ONLY On his students (this is understandable) but on people like GRICE who was only TWO YEARS his junior!

--- The rest is history!

In the case of Grice, he starts to get serious when he tries to systematise on what he was doing.

Recall that in 1967, in "Logic and Conversation", he chose himself as an example of a linguistic philosopher. He lists like 16 philosophers, mostly obscure. One philosopher he cites is NOT obscure. He refers to his own,

"Causal theory of perception", 1961.

He starts to wonder what he meant by 'implication', as it applies to the phenomenalist verb, 'seems':

That red pillar box seems red to me.

Why not 'is'?

This 'doubt-or-denial' implication, is it part of the _sense_ of 'seem'? It's not!

----

Things sometime seem as they are!

---

So, Grice is bringing in a caveat: the analysis of use versus meaning or over meaning should take into consideration that conditions of use do not specify conditions of meaning necessarily (contra Witters I and Witters II).

---

By this time, he was finding 'enemies' in Strawson (who had said that 'and' and "&" have different _meanings_ -- in "Introduction to Logical Theory") or with much younger (and American) philosophers like Searle. I like to think of Grice's "Logic and Conversation" as a response to Searle, "Aberrations and modifications", in British Analytic Philosophy.

---

Grice has the answer. He thinks that we need a theory of lingo (or language) as a rational activity. This should explain things like the scale:

seem, is.

know, believe

3,2,1,...

etc.

We say 'seem' when we think 'is' would be too strong a thing to say. We say "There are four apples" in the basket, when we think that to say that there are 3 apples is too soft or weak a thing to say (when there are four -- surely if there are 4 apples, there are 3 apples).

---

He then needs to evoke the rule by which we play:

'be strong, unless you kant' -- in the things you say. The category of Quantity, as he later relabelled.

No other philosopher had considered these pragmatic categories, almost.

Nowell-Smith HAD, in his "Ethics", when he speaks of 'relevance' and 'sincerity', or Urmson in various papers, as Austin. Indeed Strawson himself had pointed to a principle of relevance, and a principle of ignorance (and of knowledge) explaining our use of 'definite descriptions'.

In this light, Grice comes out as bringing to the fore the rationale behind various uses of locutions of philosophical interest.

Philosophers had been loose in their wordings. Take L. J. Cohen, who was teaching at Oxford at the time. His "Diversity of Meaning" and later work suggests that we can very well 'multiply' senses, as we need them. Grice finds Rationalism a better practice. In the proceedings, he finds alliances with Aristotle and Kant (his Kantotle) which helps...

Philosophers who examine Grice only for his contribution to this or that (dthis or dthat, in Kaplan's parlance) but are unware or uninterested in the continuity of his thought are bound to ignore this or that, but that's life!

----

And so on!

More on Izzing and Hazzing

2012-01-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

Roger Bishop Jones

Without as yet actually using Grice's words (though I might well put them in soon), the subject matter of Grice's work on predication in Aristotle is one of the topics under discussion at the moment on the phil-logic@philo.at mailing list.

It may not be a favourite haunt of Grice club denizens (Grice doesn't often get a mention) but I thought it worth a mention.

In my own formal work partly inspired by the Grice/Code collaboration I combined formal models of essential and accidental predication (izzing and hazzing in Grice's terms) with the syllogistic logic.
In doing so, my preliminary conclusions were that once you bring in that distinction (which seems to originate rather in Aristotle's metaphysics than his organon), then the rules of the syllogism become more complex, the usual conception of validity not being reflected fully for all kinds of predication.

Grice's interest seems to have been at least partly in multiplicity of "being", the question whether that verb has more than one sense.
Izzing and Hazzing are different names to distinguish two ways in which "being" (and some other words like "having") are used, the neologism being useful because the distinction between essential and accidental predication (as this is conceived by Aristotle) is not in ordinary language consistently conveyed by distinct vocabulary.
Grice I believe was inclined to question that multiple senses really are involved, and the question arises by what criteria one can judge whether observed usage constitutes a single or multiple senses.

On this I remain at present, much less than adequately acquainted with Grice's position, but there is one possible criterion which now occurs to me as a result of material on phil-logic.
It seems that there may be differences in Aristotle's conception of the ontological commitments implicit in affirmative propositions according to whether they involve essential or accidental predication, and hence differences in truth conditions.
The idea is that an accidental universal affirmation does entail existence, whereas an essential one does not.
I am still not clear on whether this is the case, but if it were and the truth conditions do vary in such a manner, then it is hard to see how these two kinds of predication could avoid being distinguished as different senses.

Could one plausibly argue against the "multiplicity of being" if it were once established that there is a multiplicity of truth conditions?

RBJ

Grice, Dummett and Magee

2012-01-21T14:19:00.000-08:00

Roger Bishop Jones

I am always interested in critiques of one man's analytic philosophy in the terms of another's.
And also in the dispossessed or marginalised, those who might possibly have become academic philosophers had not their philosophical inclinations been too far removed from the prevailing orthodoxy of their day or whose philosophy was conducted in some more liberal context sheltered from the critical gaze of the principle centers of analytic orthodoxy.
In that category I count Gellner, Berlin, and Magee, possibly Murdoch and in all of these cases the orthodoxy of their youth was probably "linguistic philosophy".

Why not Popper, Lakatos, ...? In these terms perhaps LSE is a haven for philosophical unorthodoxy. Well I don't feel that Popper and Lakatos were marginalised. Perhaps its just an Oxford thing I am groping at, since Gellner, Berlin, Magee and Murdoch were all in some way dissenting Oxonians.

It had not occurred to me that Dummett should be thought outside the fold of linguistic philosophy until Speranza's recent postings about his critical attitude towards Austin.

I suppose to make sense of this we must distinguish between "linguistic philosophy" and "ordinary language philosophy", and say that Dummett may not have been an "ordinary language philosopher" but he was certainly a linguistic philosopher. He was a linguistic philosopher because he gave primacy to philosophy of language, and because he seems to have subscribed to a point of view which Magee singled out for especially thorough refutation in his "confessions of a philosopher".
If we take this view (which I will explain shortly) then we can see Grice's philosophy as moderating not only the extremes of Austinian ordinary language philosophy, but also the extreme of linguistic philosophy which Dummett inhabited.

The doctrine which Magee singled out for special obloquy is the argument for the primacy of linguistic philosophy on the grounds that thought is essentially linguistic. When we sit silently chewing the cud, the argument goes, our thinking is a stream of bits of language which we just happen to refrain from articulating.
Since all thought consists of propositions expressed or repressed, the philosophy of language has prime place, and a study of language is an essential part of any philosophical enterprise.
This is a doctrine which Dummett does explicitly subscribe to, somewhere, perhaps in his "Is analytic philosophy systematic and should it be?".
Dummett also at least some of the time, and particularly in his attempt to provide a philosophical justification for intuitionistic logic,

The analogous caricature of Austinian ordinary language philosophy would be that philosophy is just the study of ordinary language, and the advancement of our understanding of this instrument through a detailed analysis of its use.
This nominally as a prelude to the resolution of extra-linguistic philosophical problems. This seems to be the line in Austin's "A Plea for Excuses", which is his most explicit metaphilosophical pronouncement.
The Austin of "Sense and Sensibilia" is using observations about ordinary language in a critique of a philosophical argument concerning a problem which is not itself purely linguistic.
But the Austin of "Doing things with words" seems to have moved on from criticising a philosophical position to practicing a new kind of philosophy consisting primarily or exclusively in the study of language through its non philosophical manifestations.

My impression is that Grice doesn't himself fit in with either of these extremes.
His essay on philosophical method and ordinary language in WOW suggests:

Firstly that philosophical analysis is a kind of conceptual analysis (which surprises me a little, I would not have thought that consistent with the whole of his philosophical output),

Secondly the assertion of an "unswerving association" of philosophy with the study not just of language but of "ordinary language".

But an association is not an identification, so there is some softening there.

Grice associates the opposition to this point of view (thinking of Russell and Quine) with "scientism".
This critique is probably even more applicable to Rudolf Carnap, who, because of his dedication to the formalisation of science and his conception of science as encompassing all systematic study of empirical or synthetic truth, does at least regard the study of ordinary language as empirical science (and the kind of philosophy which he practiced as a deductive/demonstrative science insofar as it establishes new truths rather than proposing new languages and methods).

Sorry, I think I must have lost my thread.
I am trying to get a better handle quite generally on the kinds of philosophical analysis which have been proposed or practiced and their relationships, which seems like an enterprise of unending complexity, since it is in the nature of philosophy not only that no two philosophers share a common philosophy, but probably also that no two share the same conception of what philosophy is or how it should be done.
Making an illuminating story out of this (which is what I am trying to do) is a bit of a challenge, and I am interested especially in how my own limited conception of 20th Century philosophy looks wrong to others (particularly in how it exposes my extensive ignorance!).

RBJ

Dummett gets interviewed

2012-01-17T08:35:00.000-08:00

Speranza

Jones was wondering about the source for the Dummett interviews.

One is at:

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/552/

-- and there are TWO interviewers, which I have simplified as "Q", and where Dummett becomes "A". The two interviewers are R. F. and M. S. They tend to expand on the questions in a charming way. At one point, Dummett (our "A") utters, (words to the effect): "Hey, I shouldn't be posing the questions, I know..."

There is another interview, to Dummett, which Dummett cared to reprint in his book, "Origin of Analytic Philosophy". He conducted the interview in German. He later found the thing fascinating enough to care to translate it to English. It is perhaps less technical than the RF/MS interview.

BUT...

The interview in "Origin of Analytic Philosophy", and I was thinking of sharing this with "City of Eternal Truth" AND Carnap Corner, there is a reference, by Dummett to

CARNAP.

This in the context of Austin. He calls Austin's influence 'noxious', and I can only think that if Grice was motivated to defend the Oxonian dialectic, was to counterpoint this rather otiose comments by Dummett.

When it comes to Austin, Dummett notes that it was not so much what Austin DID that bothered him, but what Austin CEASED to do. "Disregard for Carnap", comes first to Dummett's mind.

So --- it's like saying that Austin should have been different from what Austin was.

Oxonian types of a certain generation -- not Grice's -- expected too much from their tutors and stuff (staff?). Dummett, as the interviewer to "Origin of Anaytic Philosophy" points out, disregards Austin.

"So, Austin did teach you something useful, then?" (The interviewer is referring to the fact that Dummett would never have heard the name "Frege" had it not been for Austin caring to translate the "Grundlagen" into English prose for Blackwell for this 'Foundations of modern epistemology' course.

----

The RF and MS interview was published in a non-philosophical venue, and it covers pretty much everything. The latter sections of the interview bring in Dummett's philosophy of mind, and his conception of metaphysics as "philosophy of physics".

And so on.

----

Hopefully, the Dummett unpublished papers will be deposited at the Bodleian, for Griceains and Dummettians alike to investigate.

As we know, the references by Grice to Dummett are meagre: a passing reference in WoW:4, and a mention of Dummett as a "no" philosopher (along with female philosophers Murdoch and Anscombe). But we can imagine further connections, as we bring in Urmson into the picture (who taught Dummett at Christ Church) and indeed Flew, a tutee of Grice -- this is something that fascinates philosophers: the 'genealogy' in terms of tutorials.

On the whole, the most technical reference by Dummett to Grice is the idea that 'implicature' is so technical a notion that it cannot fit with 'ordinary language philosophy' (in "Is analytic philosophy systematic, or ought it be?", repr. in "Truth and other enigmas").

Personally, I believe that "The influence of Grice on Frege" should also shed light on further connections. It seems to be considered that Dummett's Frege is the definite, reference Frege. But he ain't! --- There are many notions in Frege that correspond quite closely to notions in Griceian pragmatics: colouring, for example. Dummett was interested in just one side to Frege, and wanted to 'deconstruct', as it were, the idea of truth behind 'truth-conditional' semantics as Dummett saw it or failed to do it!

---- The funeral for Dummett took place at St. Alosyus, Oxford.

----

R. I. P.

Grice and The Aristotelian Society

2012-01-16T07:02:00.001-08:00

Speranza

Table of Contents of The Aristotelian Society, Proceedings, vol. 112, with commentary.

ORIGINAL ARTICLES

"Nominalistic Adequacy"
Jeffrey Ketland (Munich)

-----

"Plural Quantification and Modality"
Gabriel Uzquiano (Oxford)

----

"Beyond Eros: Friendship in the Phaedrus"
Frisbee C. C. Sheffield (Cambridge)

cfr. Grice on Judith Baker, Aristotle on the friend as the alter ego, in WoW, Grice, Eschatology.

---

"Universality and Argument in Mencius IIA6"
R. A. H. King (Glasgow)

---

"Reference and the Permutation Argument"
Richard Gaskin (Liverpool)

---

DISCUSSION NOTES

---

"Self-Respect Regained"
Jake Chandler (Leuven) and Adam Rieger (Glasgow)

---

"Transparency as Inference:
A Reply to Alex Byrne"
Markos Valaris (New South Wales)

---

________________________________________
"Intention and the Self"
Rory Madden (UCL)

---

"Is There a Problem of Other Minds?"
Anil Gomes (Oxford)

---- Cfr. Paul, cited by Grice, "Is there a problem about ... sense data?" "Is there a problem about" -- arguments?

---

"Hearing Properties, Effects or Parts?"
Casey O'Callaghan (Rice)

cfr. Grice's example in "Personal Identity": "I am hearing a noise".

---

"Reasons for Action"
Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA)

--- Cfr. Grice, "Intention and uncertainty". Willing as a reason for acting.

"Cross-Modal Experiences"
Fiona Macpherson (Glasgow)

---

"Counterfactuals, Overdetermination and Mental Causation"
Simona Aimar (Oxford)

---- Grice on "Indicative conditionals" -- implicature: "Subjective conditionals" are not implicatural.

"A Critique of Hermeneutical Injustice"
Laura Beeby (Sheffield)

---

"Specular Space"
Clare Mac Cumhaill (Edinburgh)

---

"Angels and Philosophers: With a New Interpretation of Spinoza's Common Notions"
Eric Schliesser (Ghent) in response to Susan James (Birkbeck) on "Spinoza on the Politics of Philosophical Understanding"

---

And so on.

Was Grice an angel?

---

The Influence of Grice on Frege

2012-01-15T12:21:00.000-08:00

Speranza

It is fascinating to review Dummett's intellectual autobiography. While critical of Austin and Grice, it was via Austin that Dummett became who Dummett was. This optional paper programme for Dummett's BA had Dummett exploring Frege's "Foundations" that Austin had translated.

As Beaney, Neale, Horn, and others have showed, there is a lot of agreement between Frege's and Grice's views on the workings of natural language. Dummett was never emphatic about this. Rather, he focused on what he saw as the negative side ('noxious') of the type of linguistic botany that had Austin, Strawson, and Grice, explore underlying mechanisms for the explanation of divergences between first-order predicate calculus and, shall we say, English. And so on.

Dummett and "Oxford philosophy": Grice's Reply

2012-01-15T12:04:00.000-08:00

Speranza

----

In "Origins of Analytic Philosophy", Dummett reprints an interview with his German translator. The nice thing about it is the 'dialogue' format. He expands on things he talks about in his other (LSE) interview, rather than the 'dialogue' with Davidson (videorecorded).

He refers to Austin at various stages. Dummett calls Austin's influence 'noxious'. We know that it is around Austin that Grice's place in "post-war Oxford philosophy" centres, so the connection is interesting. Besides the bad things Dummett has to say about "Oxford philosophy", of the type that Dummett never showed a sensibility for, there's this bit about Frege.

It was via Austin's translation of Frege that Dummett grew his interest for Frege.

Now, Grice has expanded on various aspects of what he calls the "Oxonian dialetic", and Dummett has not been a good critic of it, never having quite understood it. Dummett's tutors at Christ Church were members of Austin's playgroup -- two of them: Urmson and Flew -- (Foster wasn't).

The Frege-Austin connection is good. Students of Frege (I'm not) are realising how many of Frege's concoctions relate to neo-Griceian ones. Indeed, alla Bradbury in "Eeating people is wrong", I am tempted to refer to "the influence of Grice on Frege". The idea of 'conventional implicature' relates, in surprising ways, to Frege's views on colouring, etc. (Neale has written on this, and also Horn).

----

So, we have a methodological-substantive interaction to consider here: Dummett's criticism to the methodology of "Oxford philosophy" AND the outcomes of such methodology, as they relate to outcomes of other methodologies and approaches that Dummett favours.

Dummett seems always to have been a 'continental' type, and ironically refers to the 'insularity' which he associated with Austin's Play Group. I can agree that it tended towards insularity in various ways. As Warnock recalls in "Saturday mornings", they never cared to publish their views, because they knew they were the centre of world philosophy, and they didn't need to promote what they are into.

Dummett notes the reverence and iconic status that the Play Group attained in the USA: Austin and Grice were indeed both William James lecturers. Dummett's implicature seems to be that the Americans should rather be concentrating on grander Continental names like Frege.

At one point in "Reply to Richards", Grice mentions his classical background. Like Austin, Grice had a first in classics (rather than PPE, then unexistent). This sensibility for the 'dead' languages -- Graeco-Roman, as it were -- is important, Grice notes, to understand the members of the Play Group and their sensitivity for questions of usage. Naturally, those deprived of this classical education are bound to criticise those who have it of displaying and showing off a talent which is a sign of a privilege. While Dummett had attended a public school (and a good one at that: Winchester), he apparently never seems to have displayed an interest in questions of usage (until much later when, provoked by his students'papers -- "Grammar and style, for examination candidates").

So, Dummett's connection with Austin is interesting in it being a first-hand encounter with Grice's Play Group. It was via Austin's "Methods in Modern Epistemology", the optional-paper programme for the BA at Oxford, which, Dummett tells us, had Austin translating Frege (for Blackwell). It was via tutorials with Urmson (a colleague of Grice, though slightly younger) and Flew (a tutee of Grice) that Dummett learned about philosophy (also Foster).

YET --- given Dummett's different sensibilities (his growing interest in Frege -- he ceased to show any respect for the sort of 'linguistic botany' that the Play Group practiced. Dummett's further commentaries on or against Strawson should also be considered.

By the time of the revival of truth-conditional semantics with Davidson in Oxford, this streak of anti-Oxonian analysis in Dummett had been forgotten, and Dummett could yet again show his polemic approach in yet different ways. And so on.

Wright's Elitist Implicature

2012-01-14T10:12:00.000-08:00

Speranza

Wright’s Philosophical Ramblings

During Summer 2011 Crispin Wright (NIP Director and Professor at NYU) walked The Pennine Way, 268 miles along the "backbone of England" from the Derbyshire peak District to the Scottish Borders.

Wright's aim was to raise money to support graduate students from elsewhere to visit the Northern Institute of Philosophy and to support Northern Institute of Philosophy graduate students to visit other institutions.

This is in line with a general mission of the Institute to support early career philosophers to develop their interests and skills through collaboration and philosophical interactions. The costs of such visits and exchanges are seldom adequately provided for in the budgets of grant giving authorities, and philosophy departments, even when in principle willing to support research-related travel by graduate students, are less and less able to do so.

Each night of the journey, Crispin answered — or anyway addressed — a philosophical (or not) question chosen by the benefactors.

Below is a sample of one of Crispin's responses, given on day DAY FOURTEEN after walking from Alston to Slaggyford.

Q: Should philosophy be funded, even if funding it holds forth almost no prospect of improving the lives of ordinary people? If so, why?”

WRIGHT:

"There are a number of ingredient questions here. One is whether philosophy has any value, – for presumably it should not be funded if it hasn’t. Another is whether the kind of value that philosophy has, or ought to have, depends upon its being appreciated as valuable in the way in which the value of a good joke, perhaps, depends upon its being appreciated as funny."

"A third is whether it is really true that money spent on funding philosophy has little or no chance of improving the lives of ‘ordinary people’. And a fourth is whether the kind of value that philosophy possesses – if any – is worth funding, given the multitude of pressing demands on scarce resources."

"Finally there is the question whether, even if it is good that some money be spent on philosophy, it is appropriate that it be public money, or whether the matter should be left to concerned individuals and charities."

"So, not a simple question. But matters become still more complex when we ask what we are understanding by ‘philosophy’. I don’t have in mind a distinction between different broad schools of philosophy – say Maoist, or Zen, or Continental, or Analytical – or different areas of philosophy, (though I suppose somebody might think that philosophy of language is worth funding but analytical metaphysics is not ☺.)"

"But we do need to distinguish the teaching of philosophy, the products of philosophy, the process of philosophical research, philosophical conversation, debate and interaction, and outreach – the cultivation of philosophical awareness, and interest, in the wider community."

"One thing that I think is clear straight away is that, contrary to what one might first assume, philosophical process is a very large part of the value of philosophy. Suppose it became possible to program computers to take over most of the projects of philosophical research currently being pursued in academia, and to produce articles and books about the issues matching the standards of the better contemporary work. Few would feel, “Well good, we can leave all that to the machines now, and get on with other things”. The quality of its research products is of course an important component in the value of philosophy, but it is crucial that these products be attained by human beings, and strongly preferable that they be attained by a shared process in which there is conversation and mutual understanding of why what results results, of the conceptual pressures and constraints that shape it. It isn’t even true that a good product is a necessary condition of a good philosophical process: an excellent philosophical seminar does not need to result in a blueprint for a research paper."

"If this is right, then we should give a qualified endorsement to the analogy with the good joke. A good philosophical process will be one which, necessarily, is appreciated as such by its participants, as interesting, eye-opening, inspiring, and perhaps importantly revisionary. So now the overarching question begins to look something like this."

*************** WRIGHT'S ELITIST IMPLICATURE:

Wright writes:

"Should funds be invested
in promoting this kind of
activity even if it stands no prospect of improving the
lives of the ‘ordinary folk’ who don’t participate in it?"

Wright adds:

"Setting aside

the elitist implicature

[the term is Grice's]

[that]: ["][T]hose who do
participate are somehow extraordinary ["],

the answer seems to me pretty obvious."

---- [No explicature required].

"If it is a good for those who participate, then in a pluralist and civilized society, participation should be encouraged, and its scope should be widened as far as possible."

"And now the issue starts to take on essentially the same kind of contour that the corresponding question takes with, say, the performing arts, and sport."

It is good that people be trained to participate, to the best of their ability. It is good that those who have the capacity to excel at the highest level be supported to do so. It is good that as many as possible be brought into position where they can appreciate and value such excellence. And it is not good, of course, if such excellence becomes the province of a few, highly trained individuals performing, as it were, behind closed doors."

"It is in this last respect that philosophy is especially vulnerable. World class sprinting, or football, can excite people who cannot sprint, or do not know how to kick a ball. Great orchestral music can, to a point, be appreciated by the musically untrained, though there are many different levels of appreciation of musical performance and those who know something of the history of music, who can read a musical score, or who can play an instrument, will literally hear, and enjoy, much more. But in philosophy, as indeed in chess, it can seem that there is no corresponding scale of partial levels of appreciation. An inexperienced chess player will derive no entertainment from observing a game at grandmaster level. And when even graduate students can struggle to follow an exchange between philosophers in the top echelon of the profession, there isn’t likely to be much of interest there to the philosophically untrained."

"But I think this merely qualifies the point I am making, rather than defeats it. In the former Soviet Union – and I dare say in Russia still – chess did have the status of a popular sport. There was a culture of chess playing, and training, from an early age, that was quite unmatched anywhere else. And the general level of chess understanding in the population at large was such that the exploits of the great champions – Petrosian, Tal, Botvinnik, Spassky, and the rest – were appreciated in much the way that the skills of top footballers used to be appreciated in the days when almost every kid knew how to trap, shield, pass or run with a football, or a tin can, through long hours of practice in the streets."

"Although there is a glint in my eye as I write this, I am not seriously suggesting that we should work towards a culture where analytic philosophy has the same place in the hearts of the citizenry at large as chess had in the former Soviet Union. But I am perfectly serious when I say that the full value of philosophy – as both activity and research discipline – does depend upon the existence of the equivalent of a ‘grass roots’, a culture of philosophical education and awareness contrasting utterly with the narrowing of the subject to an academic specialism, whose movements and preoccupations have absolutely no impact on the thought even of other academics and intellectuals, let alone the population at large, which professional philosophers have largely been content to tolerate almost since I first took an interest in the subject. In doing this they have been allowing the branch to wither on which they sit. Even cosmologists have done a better job of communicating to the public at large something of the general nature of their subject and the present state of its major issues than philosophers."

"So of course philosophy should be funded, but only because it belongs to the kind of value that the subject has that the style of thinking it involves, and its preoccupations, is capable of communication to, and beneficial impact upon, the lives of the population in general. In essence, the reasons why philosophy should be funded are more or less the same as those (non-instrumental) reasons why education generally should be funded. But a sea change is needed in the attitudes of philosophers themselves who have, for the most part, too long been content to bury their heads in their teaching and research and to ignore their obligations as wider communicators. When those obligations have come to be more widely met, the title question will no longer seem terribly controversial."

"I haven’t touched on the matter of who should fund philosophy. That's another, quite complex discussion in itself."

OTHER questions rambled by Wright:

Question 1.

Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. What do you think this means?

--- Speranza: I wonder.

---

2. Are you thinking what I am thinking?

---- Speranza: What do YOU think?

3.

"Epistemology, Metaphysics, Semantics: are any of the branches of philosophy mentioned more fundamental than the others?"

Speranza:

Grice: "No. That's why I entitled Section II in WoW: "Explorations in SEMANTICS AND METAPHYSICS", and surely there is no implicature to the ordering of conjuncts in "p & q".

QUESTION 4.

"What, to your mind, have been the most interesting philosophical ideas in the last 50 years?"

Speranza: implicature.

Grice: "Implicature AND disimplicature."

QUESTION 5.

"Have you ever had a radical change of mind about some philosophical topic? What made you change your mind?"

Speranza: Grice.

Grice: Grice.

QUESTION 6.

"Who is your philosophical hero and why?"

Speranza: Grice. Why? Why not?

Grice: Hardie.

---

QUESTION 7.

Does god exist? Why/why not?

Speranza: I use capitals to refer to God. The Greeks didn't.

Grice: My father was a non-conformist.

QUESTION 8.

Apparently, you're a big football fan. What is it that you like in football?

--- Grice: I prefer cricket.

--- Speranza: Grice was the head ("captain", he called it) of the football team at Christ Church.

---

QUESTIN 9.

"What do you think is the hardest philosophical question?"

---- Speranza: What Timothy Williamson may think about the vagueness of 'hard'? (Just teasing).

Grice: "hard" disimplicates.

---

QUESTION 10.

What are numbers?

---- Speranza: Numbers of what?

---- Grice: A number is a platonic quantity implicature ("Joan Rivers is eighty years old" ENTAILS "Joan Rivers is nine years old").

QUESTION 11.

"What do you think is the most important thing that you learnt from your teachers?"

Speranza: I didn't know they were my teachers.

Grice: From Hardie, "What is the meaning of 'of'?"

---

QUESTION 12.

What do you take to be your biggest philosophical achievement?

GRICE: My life, as a whole?

Speranza: Take? Why not give?

--

QUESTION 13.

"Why are there so few women doing analytic philosophy?"

--- Grice: Foot, Avramides, Anscombe. In fact, MANY females (We don't 'disimplicate' "women").

Speranza: Some of my friends are female.

---

QUESTION 14.

What can philosophy achieve?

Grice: 'achieve' as in 'achieve'?

Speranza: I use capitals to refer to philosophy.

QUESTION 15.

You founded two philosophical research centres? Why?

--- Speranza: One was the Grice Club. The other wasn't.

Grice: One was the Aristotelian Society, but it was already there. The other was the Mind Association, even if I'm a functionalist, and it was already there, too, almost.

(Grice's favourite society was Oxford's "Philosophical Society" -- Speranza's favourite society is Nancy Mitford's "Society" as in "Society lady".

Question 16.

Have you ever had a radical change of mind about some philosophical topic? Which one? What made you change your mind?

Speranza: I think I've heard this before.

Grice: I was a non-conformist, and then I changed.

Question 17.

How should we conceive of truth in philosophy?

Speranza: I use capital to refer to "Truth".

Grice: I prefer implicature.

Question 18.

If scientists explain the world and how things work, what do philosophers do?

---- Speranza: Must a philosopher DO? (Cfr. Sir Cecil Vyse, in "A room with a view": "profession"? That's a rude word.

Grice: Philosophers philosophise. See my "In defence of a dogma" written with my former pupil Strawson (now Sir Peter).

QUESTION 19.

What is philosophy?

--- Speranza: Isn't the pretentious etymology obvious enough? (Love-Wisdom).
Grice: What is NOT philosophy?

---

QUESTION 20.

Has being a philosopher had an impact on how you approach life?

Crispin Wright: Yes.

---

Crispin Wright and his elitist implicature

2012-01-14T09:42:00.000-08:00

Speranza

---

During Summer 2011 Crispin Wright (NIP Director and Professor at NYU) walked The Pennine Way, 268 miles along the "backbone of England" from the Derbyshire peak District to the Scottish Borders.

His aim was to raise money to support graduate students from elsewhere to visit the Northern Institute of Philosophy and to support Northern Institute of Philosophy graduate students to visit other institutions.

This is in line with a general mission of the Institute to support early career philosophers to develop their interests and skills through collaboration and philosophical interactions.

The costs of such visits and exchanges are seldom adequately provided for in the budgets of grant giving authorities, and philosophy departments, even when in principle willing to support research-related travel by graduate students, are less and less able to do so.

We hope to build a Trust Fund at NIP to enable us to provide such support as a part of the regular working routine of the Institute.

Each night of the journey, Crispin answered — or anyway addressed — a philosophical (or not) question chosen by the benefactors.

Below is a sample of one of Crispin's responses, given on day DAY FOURTEEN after walking from Alston to Slaggyford.

“Should philosophy be funded, even if funding it holds forth almost no prospect of improving the lives of ordinary people? If so, why?”

"There are a number of ingredient questions here. One is whether philosophy has any value, – for presumably it should not be funded if it hasn’t. Another is whether the kind of value that philosophy has, or ought to have, depends upon its being appreciated as valuable in the way in which the value of a good joke, perhaps, depends upon its being appreciated as funny. A third is whether it is really true that money spent on funding philosophy has little or no chance of improving the lives of ‘ordinary people’. And a fourth is whether the kind of value that philosophy possesses – if any – is worth funding, given the multitude of pressing demands on scarce resources. Finally there is the question whether, even if it is good that some money be spent on philosophy, it is appropriate that it be public money, or whether the matter should be left to concerned individuals and charities.

So, not a simple question. But matters become still more complex when we ask what we are understanding by ‘philosophy’. I don’t have in mind a distinction between different broad schools of philosophy – say Maoist, or Zen, or Continental, or Analytical – or different areas of philosophy, (though I suppose somebody might think that philosophy of language is worth funding but analytical metaphysics is not ☺.) But we do need to distinguish the teaching of philosophy, the products of philosophy, the process of philosophical research, philosophical conversation, debate and interaction, and outreach – the cultivation of philosophical awareness, and interest, in the wider community.

One thing that I think is clear straight away is that, contrary to what one might first assume, philosophical process is a very large part of the value of philosophy. Suppose it became possible to program computers to take over most of the projects of philosophical research currently being pursued in academia, and to produce articles and books about the issues matching the standards of the better contemporary work. Few would feel, “Well good, we can leave all that to the machines now, and get on with other things”. The quality of its research products is of course an important component in the value of philosophy, but it is crucial that these products be attained by human beings, and strongly preferable that they be attained by a shared process in which there is conversation and mutual understanding of why what results results, of the conceptual pressures and constraints that shape it. It isn’t even true that a good product is a necessary condition of a good philosophical process: an excellent philosophical seminar does not need to result in a blueprint for a research paper.

If this is right, then we should give a qualified endorsement to the analogy with the good joke. A good philosophical process will be one which, necessarily, is appreciated as such by its participants, as interesting, eye-opening, inspiring, and perhaps importantly revisionary. So now the overarching question begins to look something like this: should funds be invested in promoting this kind of activity even if it stands no prospect of improving the lives of the ‘ordinary folk’ who don’t participate in it? Setting aside the elitist implicature that those who do participate are somehow extraordinary, the answer seems to me pretty obvious. If it is a good for those who participate, then in a pluralist and civilized society, participation should be encouraged, and its scope should be widened as far as possible. And now the issue starts to take on essentially the same kind of contour that the corresponding question takes with, say, the performing arts, and sport. It is good that people be trained to participate, to the best of their ability. It is good that those who have the capacity to excel at the highest level be supported to do so. It is good that as many as possible be brought into position where they can appreciate and value such excellence. And it is not good, of course, if such excellence becomes the province of a few, highly trained individuals performing, as it were, behind closed doors.

It is in this last respect that philosophy is especially vulnerable. World class sprinting, or football, can excite people who cannot sprint, or do not know how to kick a ball. Great orchestral music can, to a point, be appreciated by the musically untrained, though there are many different levels of appreciation of musical performance and those who know something of the history of music, who can read a musical score, or who can play an instrument, will literally hear, and enjoy, much more. But in philosophy, as indeed in chess, it can seem that there is no corresponding scale of partial levels of appreciation. An inexperienced chess player will derive no entertainment from observing a game at grandmaster level. And when even graduate students can struggle to follow an exchange between philosophers in the top echelon of the profession, there isn’t likely to be much of interest there to the philosophically untrained.

But I think this merely qualifies the point I am making, rather than defeats it. In the former Soviet Union – and I dare say in Russia still – chess did have the status of a popular sport. There was a culture of chess playing, and training, from an early age, that was quite unmatched anywhere else. And the general level of chess understanding in the population at large was such that the exploits of the great champions – Petrosian, Tal, Botvinnik, Spassky, and the rest – were appreciated in much the way that the skills of top footballers used to be appreciated in the days when almost every kid knew how to trap, shield, pass or run with a football, or a tin can, through long hours of practice in the streets.

Although there is a glint in my eye as I write this, I am not seriously suggesting that we should work towards a culture where analytic philosophy has the same place in the hearts of the citizenry at large as chess had in the former Soviet Union. But I am perfectly serious when I say that the full value of philosophy – as both activity and research discipline – does depend upon the existence of the equivalent of a ‘grass roots’, a culture of philosophical education and awareness contrasting utterly with the narrowing of the subject to an academic specialism, whose movements and preoccupations have absolutely no impact on the thought even of other academics and intellectuals, let alone the population at large, which professional philosophers have largely been content to tolerate almost since I first took an interest in the subject. In doing this they have been allowing the branch to wither on which they sit. Even cosmologists have done a better job of communicating to the public at large something of the general nature of their subject and the present state of its major issues than philosophers.

So of course philosophy should be funded, but only because it belongs to the kind of value that the subject has that the style of thinking it involves, and its preoccupations, is capable of communication to, and beneficial impact upon, the lives of the population in general. In essence, the reasons why philosophy should be funded are more or less the same as those (non-instrumental) reasons why education generally should be funded. But a sea change is needed in the attitudes of philosophers themselves who have, for the most part, too long been content to bury their heads in their teaching and research and to ignore their obligations as wider communicators. When those obligations have come to be more widely met, the title question will no longer seem terribly controversial.

I haven’t touched on the matter of who should fund philosophy. That's another, quite complex discussion in itself."

Other questions rambled:

1.Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. What do you think this means?
2.Are you thinking what I am thinking?
3.Epistemology, Metaphysics, Semantics: are any of the branches of philosophy mentioned more fundamental than the others?
4.What, to your mind, have been the most interesting philosophical ideas in the last 50 years?
5.Have you ever had a radical change of mind about some philosophical topic? What made you change your mind?
6.Who is your philosophical hero and why?
7.Does god exist? Why/why not?
8.Apparently, you're a big football fan. What is it that you like in football?
9.What do you think is the hardest philosophical question?
10.What are numbers?
11.What do you think is the most important thing that you learnt from your teachers?
12.What do you take to be your biggest philosophical achievement?
13.Why are there so few women doing analytic philosophy?
14.What can philosophy achieve?
15.You founded two philosophical research centres? Why?
16.Have you ever had a radical change of mind about some philosophical topic? Which one? What made you change your mind?
17.How should we conceive of truth in philosophy?
18.If scientists explain the world and how things work, what do philosophers do?
>
19.What is philosophy?
20.Has being a philosopher had an impact on how you approach life?

For more information on Wright’s Philosophical Ramblings.

Surrey-born philosopher loves Grice

2012-01-14T09:34:00.000-08:00

Speranza

Crispin Wright was born somewhere in Surrey sometime [Dec. 21, if you must] in 1942.

He is regarded as a British philosopher.

He has written on neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and on issues related to truth, realism, cognitivism, skepticism, knowledge, and objectivity.

Crispin Wright was born somewhere in Surrey.

---- vide Grice, WoW:ii.

A: Where were you born?
B: Somewhere in Surrey.

---

Crispin Wright was educated at Birkenhead School (1950–61) and at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in Moral Sciences in 1964 and taking a PhD in 1968.

We wouldn't be discussing Wright if he had not taken an Oxford BPhil in 1969.

Naturally enough, Wright was then elected a Prize Fellow and then Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where he worked until 1978.

He then moved, alas -- the Oxonian Griceians sigh -- to the University of St. Andrews, where he was appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics and then the first Bishop Wardlaw University Professorship in 1997.

As of fall 2008, he is professor at New York University (NYU), in Manhattan.

He has also taught at the University of Michigan, Oxford University, Columbia University, and Princeton University.

Crispin Wright is founder and director of Arché, which he left in September 2009 to take up leadership of the new Northern Institute of Philosophy (NIP) at the University of Aberdeen.

In the philosophy of mathematics, he is best-known for his book Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects (1983), where he argues that Frege's logicist project could be revived by removing the Principle of Unrestricted Comprehension (sometimes referred to as Basic Law V) from the formal system.

Arithmetic is then derivable in second-order logic from Hume's principle.

Wright gives informal arguments that

(i) Hume's principle plus second-order logic is consistent, and

(ii) from it one can produce the Dedekind–Peano axioms.

Both results were proven informally by Gottlob Frege (Frege's Theorem), and would later be more rigorously proven by George Boolos and Richard Heck.

Wright is one of the major proponents of neo-logicism, alongside his frequent collaborator Bob (also known as "Robert" to his more formal friends) Hale.

Wright has also written on Wittgenstein (whom Grice calls a "minor figure" in the philosophical firmament, "along with Bosanquet and Wollaston"): Wittgenstein and the Foundations of Mathematics (1980).

In general metaphysics, his most important work is Truth and Objectivity (Harvard University Press, 1992).

Wright argues in this book that there need be no single, discourse-invariant thing in which truth consists, making an analogy with identity.

There need only be some principles regarding how the truth predicate can be applied to a sentence, some 'platitudes' about true sentences.

Wright also argues that in some contexts, probably including moral contexts,

superassertibility

will effectively function as a truth predicate. He defines a predicate as superassertible if and only if it is "assertible" in some state of information and then remains so no matter how that state of information is enlarged upon or improved.

Assertiveness is warrant by whatever standards inform the discourse in question.

Many of his most important papers in philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophical logic, meta-ethics, and the interpretation of Wittgenstein have been collected in two volumes published by Harvard University Press.

Awards

FBA: Fellow of the British Academy, 1992 -- so was Grice. So was Dummett, but he resigned even if he was later re-elected.

FRSE: Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1996

Fulbright scholar at Princeton University, 1985-6

Leverhulme Trust Personal Research Professor, 1998–2003

British Academy Research Reader, 1990-2

Prize Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, 1969–71

Extract from The Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British
Philosophers

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Name Wright, Crispin
Alternative names
Short description British philosopher
Date of birth December 21, 1942
Place of birth Surrey, England
Date of death
Place of death
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Categories: Fulbright Scholars1942 birthsLiving people20th-century philosophersAnalytic philosophersBritish philosophersPhilosophers of mathematicsEpistemologists21st-century philosophersFellows of the British AcademyPhilosophers of languageAcademics of the University of St AndrewsFellows of the Royal Society of EdinburghOld Birkonians

The South-African Grice

2012-01-14T09:30:00.000-08:00

Speranza

We are considering philosophers influenced BOTH by Grice and, say, Dummett.

John Henry McDowell was born 1942 in Boksburg, a city in South Africa.

He is a philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Although he has written extensively on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work has been in the philosophy of language.

McDowell has, throughout his career, understood philosophy to be "therapeutic" and thereby to "leave everything as it is", which McDowell understands to be a form of philosophical quietism (Though it should be noted that McDowell does not consider himself as a 'quietist').

The philosophical quietist believes that philosophy cannot make any explanatory comment about how, for example, thought and talk relate to the world but can, by offering re-descriptions of philosophically problematic cases, return the confused philosopher to a state of intellectual quietude. However, in defending this quietistic perspective McDowell has engaged with the work of leading contemporaries in such a way as to both therapeutically dissolve what he takes to be philosophical error, while developing original and distinctive theses about language, mind and value. In each case, he has tried to resist the influence of what he regards as a misguided, reductive form of philosophical naturalism that dominates the work of his contemporaries, particularly in North America.

McDowell quotes extensively from Grice in various works, but notably in the festschrift for Strawson who was coincidentally edited by another South-African philosopher: Van Straaten, and entitled after an acronym for Peter Strawson:

P S Philosophical Subjects Peter Strawson

PGRICE Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends -- a better acronym for ya.

Think of an acronym, while you're at it, for

M A E Dummett

My Aunt Exists Deeply?

South-African philosopher likes Grice

2012-01-14T09:22:00.000-08:00

Speranza

--- We are analysing philosophers who were influenced by BOTH Grice and Dummett. One is the South-African born philosopher J. H. McDowell.

---

John Henry McDowell was born 1942. He is a South African philosopher.

He was formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Although McDowell has written extensively on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, his most influential work has been in the philosophy of language.

McDowell was one of three recipients of the 2010 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award.

McDowell has, throughout his career, understood philosophy to be "therapeutic" and thereby to "leave everything as it is", which he understands to be a form of philosophical quietism (although he does not consider himself to be a "quietist").

The philosophical quietist believes that philosophy cannot make any explanatory comment about how, for example, thought and talk relate to the world but can, by offering re-descriptions of philosophically problematic cases, return the confused philosopher to a state of intellectual quietude.

However, in defending this quietistic perspective McDowell has engaged with the work of leading contemporaries in such a way as to both therapeutically dissolve what he takes to be philosophical error, while developing original and distinctive theses about language, mind and value.

In each case, he has tried to resist the influence of what he regards as a misguided, reductive form of philosophical naturalism that dominates the work of his contemporaries, particularly in North America.

McDowell's earliest published work was in ancient philosophy, most notably including a translation of and commentary on Plato's Theaetetus.

In the 1970s he was active in the Davidsonian project of providing a semantic theory for natural language, co-editing (with Gareth Evans) a volume of essays entitled Truth and Meaning.

--- This is a locus classicus, and has many Grice references, notably by B. F. Loar and C. A. B. Peacocke.

--

McDowell edited and published Evans's influential posthumous book "The Varieties of Reference" (1982). This has a FEW Grice references, but a notable one to Grice's idea of a 'dossier' that Evans understoods cognitively.

In his early work, McDowell was very much involved both with the development of the Davidsonian semantic programme and with the internecine dispute between those who take the core of a theory that can play the role of a theory of meaning to involve the grasp of truth conditions, and those, such as Professor Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett, a former Wykeham professor of logic, who argued that linguistic understanding must, at its core, involve the grasp of assertion conditions.

If, Sir Michael argued, the core of a theory that is going to do duty for a theory of a meaning is supposed to represent a speaker's understanding, then that understanding must be something of which a speaker can manifest a grasp.

----

McDowell argued AGAINST this Dummettian view and its development by such contemporaries as Crispin Wright, both that this claim did not, as Dummett supposed, represent a Wittgensteinian requirement on a theory of meaning and that it rested on a suspect asymmetry between the evidence for the expressions of mind in the speech of others and the thoughts so expressed.

----

This particular argument reflects McDowell's wider commitment to the idea that when we understand others, we do so from "inside" our own practices.

Crispin Wright and Sir Michael Dummett are treated as pushing the claims of explanation too far and as continuing Quine's project of understanding linguistic behaviour from an "external" perspective.

In these early exchanges and in the parallel debate over the proper understanding of Wittgenstein's remarks on rule following, some of McDowell's characteristic intellectual stances were formed.

To borrow a Wittgensteinian expression, the defence of a realism without empiricism, an emphasis on the human limits of our aspiration to objectivity, the idea that meaning and mind can be directly manifested in the action, particularly linguistic action, of other people, and a distinctive disjunctive theory of perceptual experience.

The latter is an account of perceptual experience, developed at the service of McDowell's realism, in which it is denied that the argument from illusion supports an indirect or representative theory of perception as that argument presupposes that there is "highest common factor" shared by veridical and illusory (or, more accurately, delusive) experiences. (There is clearly a distinction between perceiving and acquiring a belief: you can see a stick bent in the water but not believe that it is bent as you know that your experience is illusory. In illusions, you need not believe that things are as the illusory experiences represent them as being; in delusions, a person believes what their experience represents to them. So the argument from illusion is better described as an argument from delusion if it is to make its central point.)

In the classic argument from illusion (delusion) you are asked to compare a case where you succeed in perceiving, say, a cat on a mat, to the case where a trick of light deceives you and form the belief that the cat is on the mat, when it is not. The proponent of the argument then says that the two states of mind in these contrasting cases share something important in common, and to characterise this we need to introduce an idea like that of "sense data". Acquaintance with such data is the "highest common factor" across the two cases. That seems to force us into a concession that our knowledge of the external world is indirect and mediated via such sense data.

McDowell strongly resists this argument: he does not deny that there is something psychologically in common between the subject who really sees the cat and the one that fails to do so. But that psychological commonality has no bearing on the status of the judger's state of mind from the point of view of assessing whether she is in a position to acquire knowledge. In favourable conditions, experience can be such as to make manifest the presence of objects to observers - that is perceptual knowledge. When we succeed in knowing something by perceiving it, experience does not fall short of the fact known. But this just shows that a successful and a failed perceptual thought have nothing interesting in common from the point of view of appraising them as knowledge.

In this claim that a successful perceptual encounter with the world and a failed encounter share no highest common factor, a theme is visible that runs throughout McDowell's work, namely, a commitment to seeing thoughts as essentially individuable only in their social and physical environment, so called externalism about the mental.

McDowell defends, in addition to a general externalism about the mental, a specific thesis about the understanding of demonstrative expressions as involving so-called "singular" or "Russellian" thoughts about particular objects that reflects the influence on his views of Gareth Evans.

According to this view, if the putative object picked out by the demonstrative does not exist, then such an object dependent thought cannot exist - it is, in the most literal sense, not available to be thought.

In parallel with the development of this work on mind and language, McDowell also made significant contributions to moral philosophy, specifically meta-ethical debates over the nature of moral reasons and moral objectivity.

McDowell developed the view that has come to be known as secondary property realism, or sensibility or moral sense theory. The theory proceeds via the device of an ideally virtuous agent: such an agent has two connected capacities. She has the right concepts and the correct grasp of concepts to think about situations in which she finds herself by coming to moral beliefs. Secondly, for such a person such moral beliefs are automatically overriding over other reasons she may have and in a particular way: they "silence" other reasons, as McDowell puts it. He believes that this is the best way to capture the traditional idea that moral reasons are specially authoritative.

McDowell also here departs from the standard interpretation of the Humean theory of how action is motivated. The Humean claims that any intentional action, hence any moral action, is motivated by a combination of two mental states, one a belief and one a desire. The belief functions as a passive representation; the desire functions to supply the distinctively motivational part of the combination. On the basis of his account of the virtuous moral agent, McDowell follows Thomas Nagel in rejecting this account as inaccurate: it is more truthful to say that in the case of a moral action, the virtuous agent's perception of the circumstances (that is, her belief) itself justifies both the action and the desire. For example, we cannot understand the desire, as a Humean original existence, without relating it back to the circumstances that impinged on the agent and made her feel compelled to act. So while the Humean thesis may be a truth about explanation it is not true about the structure of justification and it ought to be replaced by Nagel's motivated desire theory as set out in his The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford University Press, 1970).

Implicit in this account is a theory of the metaphysical status of values: moral agents form beliefs about the moral facts, which can be straightforwardly true or false. However, the facts themselves, like facts about colour experience, combine anthropocentricity with realism. Values are not there in the world for any observer, for example, one without our human interest in morality. However, in that sense, colours are not in the world either, but one cannot deny that colours are both present in our experience and needed for good explanations in our common sense understanding of the world. The test for the reality of a property is whether it is used in judgements for which there are developed standards of rational argument and whether they are needed to explain aspects of our experience that are otherwise inexplicable. McDowell thinks that moral properties pass both of these tests. There are established standards of rational argument and moral properties fall into the general class of those properties that are both anthropocentric but real.

The connection between McDowell's general metaphysics and this particular claim about moral properties is that all claims about objectivity are to be made from the internal perspective of our actual practices, the part of his view that he takes from the later Wittgenstein. There is no standpoint from outside our best theories of thought and language from which we can classify secondary properties as "second grade" or "less real" than the properties described, for example, by a mature science such as physics. Characterising the place of values in our worldview is not, in McDowell's view, to downgrade them as less real than talk of quarks or the Higgs boson.

The later development of McDowell's work came more strongly to reflect the influence on him of Rorty and Sellars and, in particular, both Mind and World and McDowell's later Woodbridge lectures focus on a broadly Kantian understanding of intentionality, of the mind's capacity to represent. Mind and World sets itself the task of understanding the sense in which we are active even in our perceptual experience of the world. Influenced by Sellars's famous diagnosis of the "myth of the given" in traditional empiricism, in which Sellars argued that the blankly causal impingement of the external world on judgement failed to supply justification, as only something with a belief-like conceptual structure could engage with rational justification, McDowell tries to explain how one can accept that we are passive in our perceptual experience of the world while active in how we conceptualise it. McDowell develops an account of that which Kant called the "spontaneity" of our judgement in perceptual experience, while trying to avoid the suggestion that the resulting account has any connection with idealism.

Mind and World rejects, in the course of its argument, the position that McDowell takes to be the working ideology of most of his philosophical contemporaries, namely, a reductively naturalistic account that McDowell labels "bald naturalism". He contrasts this view with what he deems to be his own "naturalistic" perspective in which the distinctive capacities of mind are a cultural achievement of our "second nature", an idea that he adapts from Gadamer. The book concludes with a critique of Quine's narrow conception of empirical experience and also a critique of Donald Davidson's views on belief as inherently veridical, in which Davidson plays the role of the pure coherentist.

One of the hallmarks of McDowell's later work is his denial that there is any philosophical use for an idea that our experience contains representations that are not conceptually structured, so-called "non-conceptual content". Given that other philosophers claim that scientific accounts of our mental lives, particularly in the cognitive sciences, need this idea, this claim of McDowell's has provoked a great deal of discussion. McDowell develops a stringent reading of Sellars' diagnosis of a "myth of the given" in perceptual experience to argue that we need always to separate out the exercise of concepts in experience from a causal account of the pre-conditions of experience and that the idea of "non-conceptual content" straddles this boundary in a philosophically unacceptable way.

While Mind and World represents an important contemporary development of a Kantian approach to philosophy of mind and metaphysics, one or two of the uncharitable interpretations of Kant's work in that book receive important revisions in McDowell's later Woodbridge Lectures, published in the Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 95, 1998, pp. 431–491. Those lectures are explicitly about Wilfrid Sellars, and assess whether or not Sellars lived up to his own critical principles in developing his interpretation of Kant (McDowell claims not). McDowell has, since the publication of Mind and World, largely continued to re-iterate his distinctive positions that go against the grain of much contemporary work on language, mind and value, particularly in North America where the influence of Wittgenstein has significantly waned.

Many of McDowell's papers are collected in four volumes:

Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998)
Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998)
Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009)
The Engaged Intellect: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009)

In 1991 he gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford. A revised version of these lectures was published as Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994; reissued with a new introduction, 1996). It is an influential but difficult work that provides a controversial account of empirical justification for beliefs, covering some of the same ground as Hegel's critique of Kant but informed by a deep sensitivity to contemporary modes of scientific naturalism.

McDowell's work has been also heavily influenced not just by Grice, but, among others, by Ludwig Wittgenstein (whom Grice regards a "minor figure"), P. F. Strawson (a tutee of Grice), David Wiggins (another tutee of Grice), and, especially, Wilfrid Sellars.

Many of the central themes in McDowell's work have also been pursued in similar ways by his Pittsburgh colleague Robert Brandom (though McDowell has stated strong disagreement with some of Brandom's readings and appropriations of his work).

Both have been strongly influenced by Richard Rorty, in particular Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). In the preface to Mind and World (pp. ix-x) McDowell states that "it will be obvious that Rorty's work is [...] central for the way I define my stance here".

McDowell, J. H.
“Identity Mistakes: Plato and the Logical Atomists”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society lxx (1969–70), 181-95

Plato, Theaetetus, translated with notes (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973)
“Comment” (on a paper by F.B. Fitch), in Stephan Körner, ed., Philosophy of Logic (Blackwell, Oxford, 1976), pp. 196–201

(with Gareth Evans) “Introduction”, in Gareth Evans and John McDowell, eds., Truth and Meaning (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976), pp. vii-xxiii; translated into Spanish: “Introducción a Verdad y Significado”, Cuadernos de Crítica 37 (1984)

“Truth Conditions, Bivalence, and Verificationism”, ibid, pp. 42–66

“On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name”, Mind lxxxvi (1977), 159-85; reprinted in Mark Platts, ed., Reference Truth and Reality (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1980), pp. 141–66, and in A. W. Moore, ed., Meaning and Reference (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993), pp. 111–36; translated into Spanish: “Sobre el Sentido y la Referencia de un Nombre Propio”, Cuadernos de Crítica 20 (1983)

“On ‘The Reality of the Past’”, in Christopher Hookway and Philip Pettit, eds., Action and Interpretation (CUP, Cambridge,1978), pp. 127-44

“Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?”, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume lii (1978), 13-29
“Physicalism and Primitive Denotation”, Erkenntnis xiii (1978), 131-52; reprinted in Platts, ed., op. cit., pp. 111–30
“Virtue and Reason”, The Monist lxii (1979), 331-50; reprinted in Stanley G. Clarke and Evan Simpson, eds., Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism (SUNY Press, Albany, 1989), pp. 87–109
“Quotation and Saying That”, in Platts, ed., op. cit., pp. 206–37
“Meaning, Communication, and Knowledge”, in Zak van Straaten, ed., Philosophical Subjects: Essays on the Work of P. F. Strawson (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980), pp. 117–39
“The Role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics”, Proceedings of the African Classical Associations xv (1980), 1-14; reprinted in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1980), pp. 359–76
“Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding”, in Herman Parret and Jacques Bouveresse, eds., Meaning and Understanding (De Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1981), pp. 225–48
“Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following”, in Steven Holtzman and Christopher Leich, eds., Wittgenstein: To Follow A Rule (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981), pp. 141–62
“Falsehood and Not-Being in Plato’s Sophist”, in Malcolm Schofield and Martha Craven Nussbaum, eds., Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy presented to G. E. L. Owen (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982), pp. 115–34
“Truth-Value Gaps”, in Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science VI (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1982), pp. 299–313
“Reason and Action, III”, Philosophical Investigations v (1982), 301-5
(Editor) Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982)
“Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge”, Proceedings of the British Academy lxviii (1982), 455-79; reprinted in part in Jonathan Dancy, ed., Perceptual Knowledge (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988)
“Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World”, in Eva Schaper, ed., Pleasure, Preference and Value (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983), pp. 1–16
“Wittgenstein on Following a Rule”, Synthese 58 (1984), 325-363; reprinted in Moore, ed., Meaning and Reference, pp. 257–93
“De Re Senses”, Philosophical Quarterly xxxiv (1984), 283-94; also in Crispin Wright, ed., Frege: Tradition and Influence (Blackwell, Oxford, 1984), pp. 98-l09
“Values and Secondary Qualities”, in Ted Honderich, ed., Morality and Objectivity (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1985), pp. 110–29
“Functionalism and Anomalous Monism”, in Ernest LePore and Brian McLaughlin, eds., Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Blackwell, Oxford, 1985), pp. 387–98
“Critical Notice: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, by Bernard Williams”, Mind xcv (1986), 377-86
(with Philip Pettit) “Introduction”, in Philip Pettit and John McDowell, eds., Subject, Thought and Context (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986), pp. 1–15
“Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space”, ibid, pp. 137–68
“In Defence of Modesty”, in Barry Taylor, ed., Michael Dummett: Contributions to Philosophy (Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1987), pp. 59–80
Projection and Truth in Ethics (1987 Lindley Lecture), published by the University of Kansas
“Comments on T. H. Irwin’s ‘Some Rational Aspects of Incontinence’”, Southern Journal of Philosophy xxvii, Supplement (1988), 89-102
“One Strand in the Private Language Argument”, Grazer Philosophische Studien 33/34 (1989), 285-303
“Mathematical Platonism and Dummettian Anti-Realism”, Dialectica 43 (1989), 173-92
“Wittgenstein and the Inner World” [abstract], Journal of Philosophy lxxxvi (1989), 643-4
“Peacocke and Evans on Demonstrative Content”, Mind xcix (1990), 311-22
“John Leslie Mackie, 1917-1981”, in Proceedings of the British Academy lxxvi (1990), 487-98
“Intentionality De Re”, in Ernest LePore and Robert van Gulick, eds. John Searle and His Critics (Blackwell, Oxford, 1991), pp. 215–25
“Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein”, in Klaus Puhl, ed., Meaning Scepticism (De Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1991), pp. 148–69
“Putnam on Mind and Meaning”, Philosophical Topics xx (1992), 35-48
“Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”, in Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy Volume XVII: The Wittgenstein Legacy (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1992), pp. 40–52
“Knowledge by Hearsay”, in B. K. Matilal and A. Chakrabarti, eds, Knowing from Words (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1993; Synthese Library vol. 230), pp. 195–224
“The Content of Perceptual Experience”, Philosophical Quarterly xliv (1994), 190-205
Mind and World (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994; reissued with a new introduction, 1996) [also translated into German and Italian]
“Might there be External Reasons”, in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, eds., World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995), pp. 68–85
“Eudaimonism and Realism in Aristotle’s Ethics”, in Robert Heinaman, ed., Aristotle and Moral Realism (University College London Press, London, 1995), pp. 201–18
“Knowledge and the Internal”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research lv (1995), 877-93
“Deliberation and Moral Development in Aristotle”, in Stephen Engstrom and Jennifer Whiting, eds., Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996), pp. 19–35
“Two Sorts of Naturalism”, in Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn, eds., Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996), pp. 149–79; translated into German (“Zwei Arten von Naturalismus”), Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie v (1997), 687-710
“Précis of Mind and World”, in Enrique Villanueva, ed., Perception: Philosophical Issues, 7 (Ridgeway, Atascadero, 1996), pp. 231–9
“Reply to Gibson, Byrne, and Brandom”, ibid, pp. 283–300
“Reply to Price”, Philosophical Books 38 (1997), 177-81
“Brandom on Representation and Inference”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research lvii (1997), 157-62
“Another Plea for Modesty”, in Richard Heck, Jnr., ed., Language, Thought, and Logic: Essays in Honour of Michael Dummett (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997), pp. 105–29
“Reductionism and the First Person”, in Jonathan Dancy, ed., Reading Parfit (Blackwell, Oxford, 1997), pp. 230–50
Mind, Value, and Reality (a collection of papers) (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1998)
Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (a collection of papers) (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1998)
“Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology”, in Stephen Everson, ed., Companions to Ancient Thought: 4: Ethics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998), pp. 107–28
“Referring to Oneself”, in Lewis E. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of P. F. Strawson (Open Court, Chicago and Lasalle, 1998), pp. 129–45
“Response to Crispin Wright”, in Crispin Wright, Barry C. Smith, and Cynthia Macdonald, eds., Knowing Our Own Minds (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998), pp. 47–62.
“Précis of Mind and World” and “Reply to Commentators”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research lviii (1998), 365-8 and 403-31
“The Constitutive Ideal of Rationality: Davidson and Sellars”, Crítica xxx (1998), 29-48
“Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality” (The Woodbridge Lectures, 1997), The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 95 (1998), 431-91
“Comment on Hans-Peter Krüger’s paper”, Philosophical Explorations i (1998), 120-5 (comment on Hans-Peter Krüger, “The Second Nature of Human Beings: an Invitation for John McDowell to discuss Helmuth Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology”, ibid 107-19).
“Sellars’s Transcendental Empiricism”, in Julian Nida-Rümelin, ed., Rationality, Realism, Revision (Proceedings of the 3rd international congress of the Society for Analytical Philosophy), Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1999, pp. 42–51.
“Scheme-Content Dualism and Empiricism”, in Lewis E. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Open Court, Chicago and Lasalle, 1999), pp. 87–104
“Comment” on Robert B. Brandom, “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism”, European Journal of Philosophy vii (1999), 190-3.
“Evans, Gareth (1946-80)”: entry in the new Routledge and Kegan Paul Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
“Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity”, in Robert B. Brandom, ed., Rorty and His Critics (Blackwell, Malden, Mass. and Oxford, 2000), pp. 109–23
“Experiencing the World” and “Responses”, in Marcus Willaschek, ed., John McDowell: Reason and Nature: Lecture and Colloquium in Münster 1999 (LIT Verlag, Münster, 2000), pp. 3–17, 93-117
“Comment on Richard Schantz, ‘The Given Regained’”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research lxii (2001), 181-5
“Comments”, in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology xxi (2000), 330-43 (a special issue devoted to my work)
“Scheme-Content Dualism and Empiricism”, in Petr Kotatko, Peter Pagin, and Gabriel Segal, eds., Interpreting Davidson (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2001), 143-54. (This is a shorter version of the paper previously published in the Davidson LLP volume.)
“L’idealismo di Hegel come radicalizzazione di Kant”, in Iride 34 (2001), 527-48. (Translation of the paper I gave at the Venice Hegel conference in May 2001.)
“Knowledge and the Internal Revisited”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research lxiv (2002), 97-105.
“Moderne Auffassungen von Wissenschaft und die Philosophie des Geistes”, in Johannes Fried und Johannes Süssmann, Herausg., Revolutionen des Wissens: Von der Steinzeit bis zur Moderne (München: C. H. Beck, 2001), 116-35. (Previously published in Philosophische Rundschau.)
“Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism”, in Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher, eds., Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 173-94.
“Responses” in Nicholas Smith, ed., Reading McDowell: Mind and World (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 269–305. (Responses to the contributions.)
“How not to read Philosophical Investigations: Brandom’s Wittgenstein”, in R. Haller and K. Puhl, eds., Wittgenstein and the Future of Philosophy: A Reassessment after 50 Years (Vienna: Holder, Pichler, Tempsky, 2002), pp. 245–56.
“Non-cognitivisme et règles”, in Archives de Philosophie 64 (2001), 457-77. (Translation of my old paper “Non-cognitivism and rule-following”.)
“Knowledge and the Internal Revisited”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research lxiv (2002), 97-105.
Wert und Wirklichkeit: Aufsätze zur Moralphilosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002). (Translation by Joachim Schulte, with an Introduction by Axel Honneth and Martin Seel, of seven of the papers in my Mind, Value, and Reality.)
“Hyperbatologikos empeirismos”, Defkalion 21/1, June 2003, 65-90. (Translation into Greek of “Transcendental Empiricism”, paper delivered at the Pitt/Athens symposium in Rethymnon, Crete, in 2000.)
“Subjective, intersubjective, objective”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research lxvii (2003), 675-81. (Contribution to a symposium on a book by Donald Davidson.)
Mente y Mundo (Spanish translation by Miguel Ángel Quintana-Paz of Mind and World), Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 2003.
“L’idealismo di Hegel come radicalizazzione di Kant”, in Luigi Ruggiu and Italo Testa, eds., Hegel Contemporaneo: la ricezione americana di Hegel a confronto con la traduzione europea (Milan: Guerini, 2003). (Previously in Iride for December 2001.)
“Naturalism in the philosophy of mind”, in Mario de Caro and David Macarthur, eds., Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 91-105. (Previously published in German translation as “Moderne Auffassungen von Wissenschaft und die Philosophie des Geistes”, see above.)
“Reality and colours: comment on Stroud”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research lxviii (2004), 395-400. (Contribution to a symposium on a book by Barry Stroud.)
“The apperceptive I and the empirical self: towards a heterodox reading of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology”, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 47/48, 2003, 1-16.
“Hegel and the Myth of the Given”, in Wolfgang Welsch und Klaus Vieweg, Herausg., Das Interesse des Denkens: Hegel aus heutiger Sicht (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003), pp. 75–88.
[edit] ReviewsMichael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (Times Literary Supplement, 30 November 1973: unsigned, as was then the custom in the TLS); reprinted (still anonymously) in TLS 12 (OUP, London, 1974), pp. 217–224
John Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (London Review of Books, 17 April 1980)
Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Times Literary Supplement, January 16, 1981)
Andrew Woodfield, ed., Thought and Object (Times Literary Supplement, July 16, 1982)
[edit] Books on John McDowellSandra M. Dingli, On Thinking and the World: John McDowell's Mind and World, Ashgate, 2005
Richard Gaskin, Experience and the World's Own Language: A Critique of John McDowell's Empiricism, Oxford University Press, 2006 (See review essay by Jason Bridges at http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=8743)
Robert Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell, Blackwell / Polity Press, 2004
Jakob Lingaard (ed.) John McDowell: Experience, Norm and Nature, Blackwell, 2008
Cynthia MacDonald & Graham MacDonald (eds.), McDowell and His Critics, Blackwell, 2006
Nicholas Smith (ed.), Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, Routledge, 2002
Tim Thornton, John McDowell, Acumen Publishing, 2004
Marcus Willaschek (ed.), John McDowell: Reason and Nature, Munster: Lit Verlag, 1999
[edit] HonorsFellow of the British Academy (elected in 1983)[2]
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected in 1992) [3]
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, 2010 [4]
Honorary degree, University of Chicago, 2008[5]
Delivered the 1991 John Locke Lectures in Philosophy, Oxford University[6]
Woodbridge Lectures, Columbia University, 1997[7]
Delivered the 2006 Howison Lectures in Philosophy, University of California at Berkeley[8]
2010 Harvard Review of Philosophy Annual Lecture[9]
2011 Amherst Lecture in Philosophy, Amherst College[10]
2011 Aquinas Lecture, Marquette University[11]
[edit] References1.^ "Pitt Scholar Honored With Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, $1.5 Million Grant for Putting Human Nature Back in Philosophy". http://www.news.pitt.edu/news/McDowell-Mellon-achievement-2010.
2.^ Directory of Fellows, British Academy. Accessed April 2, 2011
3.^ List of Fellows, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Accessed April 2, 2011
4.^ Distinguished Achievement Award, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Accessed April 2, 2011
5.^ University to confer five honorary doctorates at Convocation, University of Chicago Chronicle, June 12, 2008, vol. 27, no. 18
6.^ Past Lecturers, John Locke Lectures, Department of Philosophy, Oxford University. Accessed April 2, 2011
7.^ Tim Thornton, Review: New books by John McDowell, The philosopher's magazine, no. 36, 2009. Accessed April 2, 2011
8.^ HOWISON LECTURES IN PHILOSOPHY, Graduate Council Lectures, University of California at Berkeley. Accessed April 2, 2011
9.^ The Harvard Review of Philosophy Annual Lecture, Harvard University. Accessed April 2, 2011
10.^ Events (2010-2011), Department of philosophy, Amherst College. Accessed April 2, 2011
11.^ News Briefs; February 17, 2011, Marquette University. Accessed April 2, 2011
[edit] External linkshttp://www.philosophy.pitt.edu/people/faculty/mcdowell.php Includes a CV and a list of representative publications.

Persondata
Name Macdowell, John
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth 1942
Place of birth Boksburg, South Africa
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The Grice/Dummett Connection: Via McGuinness

2012-01-14T09:16:00.000-08:00

Speranza

Brian F. McGuinness was born in Wrexham, Wales, UK, in 1927.

He holds a M.A. from the University of Oxford.

He is Professor of "The History of Scientific Thought" at Università degli Studi di Siena.

During his period as Guest of the Rector McGuinness was able to make final corrections to his selected papers,

"Approaches to Wittgenstein",

Routledge, London 2001/2.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Wittgenstein's death McGuinness was able to write some general articles.

In one, he describes his ambivalent relation to the Bloomsbury Circle. This appeared in English in Erasmo (Milan).

In the other, McGuinness deals with his intellectual project and its echoes of Goethe will perhaps yield two articles.

McGuinness gave it at a NIAS seminar and profited from the discussion.

Finally during his time in Siena, McGuinness was able to bring nearer perfection a graphic and electronic method of presenting different phases in the composition of a work of Wittgenstein's.

Applied to the earlier version of Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (the so-called Prototractatus, which McGuinness thinks contains in fact two versions) this suggests new ways of looking at what his aim was and how it changed.

An account of this was printed in the proceedings of the Bergen 2001 Conference on "Editing Wittgenstein".

An actual 'edition', which presents some technical challenges, is a project for the future.

Or not.

----

Grice said, "Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man" -- but then he was quoting Austin.

Dummett said that he 'regarded' for some time, "no doubt wrongly" as a Wittgensteinian.

Note that 'wrongly' applies to Dummett-2 recollecting Dummett-1. It would be absurd to suggest that Dummett-1 regarded himself wrongly as Wittgensteina, since 'regard' is incorrigible, for Witters -- AND Grice.

Dummett reads Grice's festschrift

2012-01-14T07:34:00.001-08:00

Speranza

-- and comments on Davidson's piece, therein, "A nice derangement of epitaphs". K. Green, of Monash, Australia, writes:

"Davidson has argued that the phenomenon of malapropism shows that languages thought of as social entities cannot be prior in the account of communication."

"This may be taken to imply that Dummett's belief, that language is prior in the account of thought, cannot be retained."

Green goes on to "criticise the argument that takes Davidson from malapropism to the denial of the priority of language in the account of communication."

Green argues, "against Davidson, that the distinction between word meaning and what speakers mean by words, used by Davidson to account for metaphor, suffices to account for malapropism."

"The reasons for the failure of Davidson's argument are used to throw light on what is meant by the priority of language over thought, and to argue that the priority thesis is ambiguous."

Alas, Dummett only complicated things, charmingly!

---

Grice, Strawson -- and Dummett

2012-01-14T07:27:00.000-08:00

Speranza

Truth and other enigmas -
Michael A. E. Dummett - 1978 -
"Strawson was not merely dismissing the question how certain expressions manage to be ... It was therefore not Strawson, but Gellner, who had missed ..."

Austin, Flew, Urmson, Grice -- and Dummett

2012-01-14T07:13:00.000-08:00

Speranza

Origins of Analytical Philosophy

Michael Dummett - 1996 -

DUMMETT:

"Not from the very start. It just so happened that Austin did a very good thing by inventing an optional paper in PPE, which I read, which was called , absurdly, 'Foundations of Modern Epistemology', and consisted of a number of ..."

Austin, Urmson, Grice -- and Dummett

2012-01-14T07:11:00.000-08:00

Speranza

The philosophy of Michael Dummett

Randall E. Auxier, Lewis Edwin Hahn - 2007 -

Dummett:

"My tutors in Christ Church were Michael Foster, Antony Flew, and James Urmson; but a tutor outside the College who influenced me far more was Elizabeth Anscombe, the literary executor and translator of Wittgenstein, who also became a ..."

Grice's "Intellectual Autobiography"

2012-01-14T07:07:00.000-08:00

Speranza

--- "Reply to Richards", section I.

This is Dummett,

"To write my autobiography has
always seemed to me a nearly
impossible task. To be of interest, it ought to
be completely honest, as surely very few autobiographies are.
If it were completely honest, it would necessarily
expose me as having often acted very stupidly or made myself
ridiculous; these are things of ..."

----

Grice in "The Library of Living Philosophers"

2012-01-14T07:00:00.001-08:00

Speranza

cited.

This is Dummett.

"The philosophy of Michael Dummett",
edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn

Published: Chicago, Ill. : Open Court, c2007
Series: library of living philosophers v. 31
LC Classification: B

Table of Contents:

Pt. 1.

Intellectual autobiography of Michael Dummett 1

--- Sample of Dummett's handwriting 2

Intellectual autobiography of Michael Dummett 3

Pt. 2.

Descriptive and critical essays on the philosophy of Michael Dummett, with replies 33

Essay 1.

"Coming to terms with Wittgenstein"

Brian McGuinness 35
Reply to Brian McGuinness 51

Essay 2.

"Dummett's backward road to Frege and to intuitionism"
Jan Dejnozka 55
Reply to Jan Dejnozka 114

Essay 3.

"Realism, anti-realism, and absolute idealism"
James W. Allard 127
Reply to James W. Allard 147

Essay 4.

"Between Scylla and Charybdis : does Dummett have a way through?"

Hilary Putnam 155
Reply to Hilary Putnam 168

Essay 5.

"The reality of language : on the Davidson/Dummett exchange"

Ernie Lepore, Kirk Ludwig 185
Reply to Lepore and Ludwig 215

Essay 6.

"What numbers really are"
Peter Simons 229
Reply to Peter Simons 248

Essay 7.

"Radically different : on Dummett's metaphilosophy"

Anat Matar 259
Reply to Anat Matar 276

Essay 8.

"If truth is dethroned, what role is left for it?"

John Campbell 281
Reply to John Campbell 301

Essay 9.

"Two principles concerning truth"
Wolfgang Kunne 315
Reply to Wolfgang Kunne 345

Essay 10.

"Dummett on truth conditions and meaning"
John McDowell 351
Reply to John McDowell 367

Essay 11.

"Pursuing an analogy"
Akeel Bilgrami 383
Reply to Akeel Bilgrami 409

Essay 12.
"Wang's paradox" / Crispin Wright 415

Reply to Crispin Wright 445

Essay 13.

"Pragmatist and verificationist theories of meaning"
Dag Prawitz 455
Reply to Dag Prawitz 482

Essay 14.
"On sense, tone, and accompanying thoughts"
Eva Picardi 491
Reply to Eva Picardi 521

Essay 15.

"Use and meaning"
Richard G. Heck, Jr. 531
Reply to Richard G. Heck, Jr. 558

Essay 16.
"Idiolect and context"
Carlo Penco 567
Reply to Carlo Penco 591

Essay 17.
"Molecularity and revisionism"
Bernhard Weiss 601
Reply to Bernhard Weiss 617

Essay 18.

"The operation called abstraction"
Christian Thiel 623
Reply to Christian Thiel 634

Essay 19.
"Asserting and excluding : steps towards an anti-realist account of classical consequence"
Ian Rumfitt 639

Reply to Ian Rumfitt 694

Essay 20.
"Belief and deductive inference"
Marco Santambrogio 699
Reply to Marco Santambrogio 719

Essay 21.
Dummett, achilles, and the tortoise / Pascal Engel 725
Reply to Pascal Engel 747

Essay 22.
Dummett's case for constructivist logicism / Peter M. Sullivan 753
Reply to Peter M. Sullivan 786

Essay 23.
Michael Dummett on social choice and voting / Maurice Salles 801
Reply to Maurice Salles 819

Essay 24.
Immigrants and refugees : individualism and the moral status of strangers / Kwame Anthony Appiah 825
Reply to Kwame Anthony Appiah 841

Essay 25.
Work against racism / Agnes Margaret Ann Chesney Dummett 845
Reply to Agnes Margaret Ann Chesney Dummett 856

Essay 26.
Dummett : philosophy and religion / Andrew Beards 863
Reply to Andrew Beards 889

Essay 27.
The first golden age of the tarot in France / Thierry Depaulis 901
Reply to Thierry Depaulis 913

Pt. 3.
Bibliography of the writings of Michael Dummett 919

Additional Authors:

Auxier, Randall E., 1961-
Hahn, Lewis Edwin, 1908-

Notes: LCCN: 2007019943

ISBN: 9780812696219 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 0812696212 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 9780812696226 (trade paper : alk. paper)
ISBN: 0812696220 (trade paper : alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references and index

"Bibliography of the writings of Michael A.E. Dummett": p. [921]-933

Contents: Intellectual autobiography of Michael Dummett -- Descriptive and critical essays on the philosophy of Michael Dummett, with replies -- Historical context -- Language and the real -- Language and truth -- Language and meaning -- Language and logic -- Not by language alone
Physical Description: xxiii, 955 p. ; 23 cm
OCLC Number: 132681449
ISBN/ISSN: 9780812696219
0812696212
9780812696226
0812696220

Grice in "The Library of Living Philosophers"

2012-01-14T06:51:00.000-08:00

Speranza

-- cited.

This is Dummett.

The Philosophy of Michael Dummett
(Volume XXXI, 2007)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sir Michael Dummett (he was knighted in 1991) is one of the most influential of living philosophers.

[And dead philosophers, for the record].

His own contributions to philosophy have been bound up with his interpretations of the earlier philosophers Frege and Wittgenstein.

Dummett's 1973 book on Frege helped to make Frege's thought central to modern philosophy.

Dummett has made many contributions to philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics.

His most celebrated achievement is his new way of looking at distinction between realism and anti-realism.

In addition to philosophy, Dummett has written on immigration law, English usage, Roman Catholic doctrine, and the history of the tarot.

Table of Contents

Michael A. E. Dummett:

"Intellectual Autobiography" -- being an autobiography of Dummett's intellect. Main points: London childhood, Winchester, and 'stuck' in Oxford (:)).

Michael Dummett

(Replies follow essays)

1. Brian McGuinness:

"Coming to Terms with Wittgenstein". (McGuinness born England).

2. Jan Dejnozka:

"Dummett's Backward Road to Frege and to Intuitionism"

---- for "Jan Dejnozka" on Grice see the annals of the Grice Club -- Dejnozka on Grice on 'eating': "The most complete account of eating I ever came across."

---

3. James W. Allard:

"Realism, Anti-realism, and Absolute Idealism"

4. Hilary Putnam:

"Between Scylla and Charybdis: Does Dummett Have a Way Through?"

---- Putnam wrote the blurb for Grice, "Studies in the way of words", Harvard.

5.

Ernie LePore and Kirk Ludwig:

"The Reality of Language: On the Davidson/Dummett Exchange"

--- There is a Youtube that someone should transcribe, "Davidson and Dummett get a laugh".

6. Peter Simons:

"What Numbers Really Are"

7. Anat Matar:

"Radically Different: On Dummett's Metaphilosophy"

8. John Campbell:

"If Truth is Dethroned, What Role is Left for It?"

9. Wolfgang Künne:

"Two Principles Concerning Truth"

10.
John McDowell:

"Dummett on Truth Conditions and Meaning"
---- McDowell was born in the North of England, and he takes Grice seriously. Vide his contribution to Strawson's festschrift, "Philosophical Subjects."

11. Akeel Bilgrami:

"Pursuing an Analogy"

Bilgrami was educated at Balliol, and has written on Grice in his "Meaning and belief".

12. Crispin Wright:

"Wang's Paradox"

13. Dag Prawitz:

"Pragmatist and Verificationist Theories of Meaning"

14. Eva Picardi:

"On Sense, Tone, and Accompanying Thoughts"

--- she has written a brief memorial to Dummett in the New York Times, online.
---- [FREGE, alla Grice].

15. Richard G. Heck, Jr.:

"Use and Meaning"

--- vide Grice's antislogan, "Meaning is NOT use" (WoW:i).

16.
Carlo Penco:

"Idiolect and Context"
--- vide Grice on idiosyncratic procedures, in WoW:vi. Uttering x meaning y.

17.

Bernhard Weiss:
"Molecularity and Revisionism"

18.
Christian Thiel:
"The Operation Called Abstraction"

19. Ian Rumfitt:
"Asserting and Excluding: Steps Towards an Anti-Realist Account of Classical Consequence"

20.

Marco Santambrogio:
"Belief and Deductive Inference"

21. Pascal Engel:
"Dummett, Achilles, and the Tortoise"

22. Peter M. Sullivan:
"Dummett's Case for Constructivist Logicism"

23. Maurice Salles:
"Michael Dummett on Social Choice and Voting"
-- vide the interview by Salles and Fara, elsewhere.

24. Kwame Anthony Appiah:
"Immigrants and Refugees: Individualism and the Moral Status of Strangers"

25. [Agnes Margaret] Ann [Chesney] Dummett:
"Work against Racism"

26.
Andrew Beards:
"Dummett: Philosophy and Religion"

27. Thierry DePaulis:
"The First Golden Age of the Tarot in France"

"Bibliography of the Writings of Michael Dummett."

-- the funeral was at St. Alosyus, Oxford.

Grice in "The Library of Living Philosophers"

2012-01-14T06:49:00.000-08:00

Speranza

-- cited.

This is for Dummett:

"The Philosophy of Michael Dummett",
Edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn
Volume 31 in the Library of Living Philosophers

----

Sir Michael Dummett has, for over half a century, been among the most respected and provocative philosophical voices in the world.

His groundbreaking and controversial work in epistemology, ontology, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics, logic, and the philosophy of history and time have come to dominate contemporary discussions of these topics.

This comprehensive volume on Dummett’s thought treats all of these subjects in detail, along with his work in the history of philosophy, philosophy of religion, grammar, econometrics, civil rights, tarot cards, and even recreation.

Dummett is the subject of volume 31 in the world-renowned Library of Living Philosophers series.

The book included Dummett’s "Intellectual Autobiography", 27 previously unpublished critical and descriptive essays by famous scholars, a reply to each essay by Dummett, and a complete bibliography of Dummett’s published works.

The list of contributors, a stellar cast of international scholars who are famous in their own right, includes the great Hilary Putnam as well as Crispin Wright, a former student of Dummett.

Dummett was the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford from 1979 until 1992 when he retired.

He was awarded the Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy (by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) in 1995 and was knighted in 1999.

Grice in "The Library of Living Philosophers"

2012-01-14T06:46:00.000-08:00

Speranza

--

cited

This is the Dummett volume:

For over 50 years, Sir Michael Dummett has been a major philosophical voice in a wide range of fields, including epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of language.

This comprehensive volume treats all of these subjects and more in detail.

It contains Dummett’s "Intellectual autobiography", 27 previously unpublished critical and descriptive essays by famous scholars, a reply to each essay by Dummett, and a complete bibliography of his published works.

Dummett on Grice: An Interview with Sir Michael Dummett

2012-01-13T15:39:00.000-08:00

Speranza

Excerpted:

Q: Could you tell us a little about the origin of your interest in philosophy in general and in analytic philosophy in particular?

DUMMETT:

"Well, my interest in PHILOSOPHY, and in particular ANALYTIC philosophy, simply derives from my study as an undergraduate. I had a HISTORY scholarship to the
Oxford college of Christ Church which I gained in 1943. Then I went into the army and I was 4 years in the Army: two years during the war and two years after the war. When I came out I realised that I’d forgotten a large amount of the history
that I’d learnt at school. So I thought it would be a mistake to read History. And I decided to read philosophy,politics and economics. I’d read a little philosophy and been interested in it, but not yet gripped by it, and I thought it would be very useful to know both politics and economics. I was absolutely gripped by the philosophy that I studied as an undergraduate, and that became my overriding interest. It was Analytic Philosophy that was absolutely dominant in Oxford, and
indeed throughout Britain I think at that time, so that was the kind of philosophy I learnt to do. I’ve always remained an analytic philosopher. But as for logic and the philosophy of mathematics, that’s a separate thing. It happened, well, again, quite
accidentally. I took, the first time it was set, an optional paper in Philosophy
in my final examination. It was one invented by J. L. Austin and it was called,
ABSURDLY, 'The Origins of Modern Epistemology'. What it was was a collection (a rather large collection) of texts, starting with Plato’s "Theaetetus", and finishing with Frege’s "Foundations of Arithmetic". These were texts which one would NOT normally have come across during the ordinary "Philosophy, Politics and Economics" course in Oxford, and I worked my way through these. I was very interested by a lot of them but I was absolutely bowled over by the "Foundations of Arithmetic", and I thought, I want to read everything this man has written. I thought it was the most brilliant work of its length, that I had ever come across. So when I got elected as a prize fellow of All Souls College I started to read everything that Frege had written. Very little was translated into English at that time, so I had to read it in German, and naturally since he was the founder of modern mathematical logic
and a lot of his writing was about logic in general, philosophical logic, but also it all was directed at the Philosophy of Mathematics, so I decided I must learn some mathematics and some mathematical LOGIC. Well, as far as mathematics was concerned, I planned to do an undergraduate course in mathematics and to take the final examination, but the Warden of All Souls -- I mean, in those days such figures had much more authority than they do now, you did what they said -- forbade me to read the Mathematics School, on the grounds that if I didn’t get a first class degree in the subject, it would shame the college. So I found someone, John Hammersley, a mathematician, who very kindly gave me tutorials in the subject (although I wasn’t going to take the examination) and I read a certain amount of mathematics for myself. As for Mathematical Logic, there was, I thought, no one in Oxford at
that time who could teach it to me. [----- WHAT ABOUT GRICE???? Speranza]. So I went and spent a year at Berkeley, California. Berkeley was then much the best for Mathematical Logic. It was done both in the Mathematics and in the Philosophy departments, and Tarski of course was there."

Q: It would be helpful if perhaps we just had a few dates here. So, when are we talking about?

Dummett:

"Well, I came up to Oxford in 1947. I took my finals in 1950 and sat the All Souls examination for prize fellowships in the same year, and was lucky enough to be elected. It was in 1955 that I went to Berkeley. When I came back I retained my
interest in the philosophy of mathematics generally, not just in Frege. I was always very interested in Frege’s work, and I’ve written about it a good deal, but, studying different philosophies of mathematics, I came upon Brouwer and the whole intuitionist school and became very interested in that. In about 1963 the position of Reader in the Philosophy of Mathematics became vacant -- it had been held by Friedrich Waismann who had been a member of the Vienna Circle. He had come to England as a refugee from Hitler, and he had been Reader in the Philosophy of Mathematics, but he switched to become Reader in the Philosophy of Science so that the position was open and I was lucky enough to get it. I held the post for 13 years. I lectured on that subject and we got the new Honours School in Mathematics and Philosophy for undergraduates started. I took a large part in the foundation of that, and then had to do an enormous amount of teaching for it because we loaded it with Mathematical Logic. So, I had to do about twice as much lecturing as the University required in order to cover it all. Then we got Robin Gandy -- he was Reader in Mathematical Logic -- and later we had Dana SCOTT as Professor of the subject. So the burden of teaching was very much lightened after these people came."
Also I gave courses in Philosophy of Mathematics. So for 13 years that was my principal obligation to the university. Of course I kept up an interest in philosophy in general, in philosophy of language and its effect on metaphysics. Those were my interests outside the philosophy of mathematics but that wasn’t what I was professionally doing.

Q: The readers of Social Choice and Welfare are mainly economists, and most
of them ignore that you are one of the most famous philosophers. Could you describe your work in philosophy, even if this seems quite impossible in a short time?

DUMMETT: Well, I’ll do my best. I have a kind of side interest in the philosophy of time. One of the first things I published was an article arguing that backwards causation (where the cause comes after the effect) was not logically impossible. I suppose that the principal interest I’ve had, and certainly what I’m best known
for, is a critique of realism and the truth-conditional theory of meaning that underlies it. That is, the theory that the MEANING of a statement consists in the condition for it to be true. Now, what we learn when we learn a language is what counts as establishing a statement as true. Not, in general, by observation but, more usually, by inference from premisses established by observation. We also learn what you’re committed to by accepting a statement as true. That is the practice of speaking a language. But the Realist position normally involves the Principle of Bivalence: that every unambiguous statement is determinately either true or false. On that position, the being true of the statement can go beyond what we are capable of recognizing. But what we are capable of recognizing consists in our ability to recognize whether the statement is established as true. The simplest possible example is this. It is normally assumed -- a realist assumption -- that the magnitude of any physical quantity is absolutely determinate and exact, that’s to say that it would be given in terms of some suitable unit, by a real number which might be rational or irrational. We can never discover that. We can only measure to within a margin of error. So, there is a statement which is true but which we are incapable ever of recognizing as true. There are plenty of such statements, and I want to question, I have questioned, how we can come by such a notion as that of a statement as being true, independently of our being able to recognize it as true? And how can we manifest possession of such a concept, and in any case, in what does it consist? It seems to me that there is a circularity. You explain what it is to grasp the proposition expressed by a statement, in terms of your grasp of another proposition; namely that it would be true under such and such conditions. That can’t be manifested in the actual practice of using the language, because all that manifests is your capacity to recognize it, to recognize the statement as true in favourable cases. So, if you reject this realist account, this truth-conditional theory of meaning, you have to have a DIFFERENT theory of meaning which I call justificationist (to understand a statement is to know what would justify you in asserting it, in other words being able to recognize it as true). And if you take that as your account of meaning, you have to jettison this principle
of bivalence because there are statements for which we have no means of recognizing
whether they’re true or false, so you can’t assume that every statement is either true or false. I mean, you’re now identifying truth with the existence of something whereby we could recognize a statement as true. That means that you have to reject classical logic in favour of what’s usually called intuitionist logic. So, now, I’ve never actually identified myself with a denial, a rejection of realism, I’ve been concerned simply to pose a challenge to the Realist standpoint and ask how it can answer these questions that I’ve posed about how do we get the concept of being true, and also to work out the implications of denying realism and adopting the justificationist theory of meaning. What effect does that have on metaphysics essentially? Is it coherent? I mean: are there problems which show it to be untenable? So: that has been my major interest. I’ve written a great deal also about the philosophy of Frege, I’ve retained my admiration for and interest in his work, so that is exegesis. It is exegesis which brings you to the frontiers of the subject, I think."

Q: Would it be fair to say then that the intuitionism in a sense underpins the anti-realism?"

Dummett: Yes.

Q: So, would your take be something along the lines of Quine, who never denied
that there are other possible logics—in fact nothing was ever sacrosanct in his view—but just basically that you were stuck with bivalence because it got you the results that you required in science, and it was simplicity that was at stake? And are you saying in a sense that we shouldn’t just draw boundaries, and we shouldn’t be so quick and content to retain boundaries. That maybe we should just look a little bit further forward to see what we might come up with if we put the full support towards something other than bivalence? Is that a fair position of where you stand?

Dummett:

Yes.

Q: Of course you recognize bivalence and its power in what it does in
mathematics, but what would happen if?

Dummett:

Exactly.

Q: Another possibility to deny bivalence would be to accept multivalence.

Dummett:

Yes. But that is not the way that I’ve gone actually. In Intuitionist Logic you can’t assert of any statement that it is neither true nor false, that would be for the intuitionist a contradiction. What you cannot do is to assume that it is determinately one or the other.

Q: It is "P or not P" what is rejected."

Dummett:

Right. And you can’t ever close off the possibility that something will be shown to be true. It may be very unlikely that it is, but there could always be evidence that would turn up. So you can’t close it off."

Q: What leads a major philosopher to devote a significant time to social choice
and voting theory?"

Dummett:

Ah, well. There is a very short answer to that. I don’t see why one shouldn’t be interested in more than one thing. I think it’s a pity in fact to concentrate just on one thing. It’s not that I see any link between them. It’s just that they both interest me."

Q: So could you describe your work in social choice and welfare?

Dummett:

Well, it’s been very spasmodic. I was first interested in the theory of voting as such. I still think that the application to voting is the salient kind of application
that social choice theory has had up to now, although it’s much more general than that as a theory. I was first interested in the theory of voting by Robin Farquharson who was a very brilliant young man and had become interested in the theory of voting while he was still an undergraduate. I knew him well, and then we wrote a paper together and that was my first contribution to the subject, in print anyway. John Hicks who, as professor, was a Fellow of All Souls at the same time as I was, congratulated me on having a paper published in "Econometrica". Well, then as you know Robin Farquharson fell victim to this awful mental illness and couldn’t really do any more creative work. I retained an interest in Social Choice Theory and I followed it a bit because people sent me offprints of articles which I read, but I didn’t make any attempt to keep up with the subject systematically. I was still very interested in the theory of voting and very interested by the absurdity of many of the voting procedures adopted within my college, and in other colleges, and
indeed in electoral systems, but I didn’t really attempt to do any more work in the subject. I very much regret that I didn’t because of that conjecture that we made in the "Econometrica" article, that no voting system could exclude the possibility of successful strategic voting, which was established by Gibbard and later Satterthwaite. I believed that that would be a terribly difficult thing to prove, but actually I don’t think it was so difficult to prove as the theorem we proved in the article. I just had this impression that it would be frightfully difficult to prove. So I never attempted to do so. Then I conceived the idea of writing this book which I published named Voting Procedures, and I thought well, if I’m going to write this I’ll have to get myself up to date in the subject of social choice theory." Luckily it happened that Amartya Sen, whom I knew quite well, had written a resum´e of the history of social choice (I don’t know if he ever published it), and he lent this to me and I studied it carefully. Then I started to write the book. The idea behind the book was to make a bridge between social choice theory which was studied mostly as you say by economists who published papers and proved all sorts of theorems, and the people practically concerned with the devising of voting procedures -- I mean politicians, members of boards of directors and so on, most of whom were completely unaware that there was any such thing as social choice theory, that anyone ever studied the theory of voting. I wanted to build such a bridge. It wasn’t, I’m ashamed to say, until I read Amartya Sen’s history of social choice theory that I became aware that the conjecture which we had made in that paper (about the non-existence of strategy proof procedures) had actually been proved. Now, Sen mentioned both Gibbard and Satterthwaite as having proved it, but didn’t give the proof. So, I became aware that it could be proved, and that it wasn’t too difficult for anyone to prove. So I sat down and produced a proof of my own. I hadn’t yet even looked at Gibbard’s paper and, as I say, I felt extremely annoyed when I found it because I thought I could have done this at any time. Since then I’ve done very little except that one paper which you published (in Social Choice and Welfare) about the Borda count. That’s the sum-total I’m afraid of my contribution to the subject. I know you liked my book, and I’m quite proud of it myself, but that’s all I’ve done: the first article, and the book, a little article later, and also a more popular book called Principles of Electoral Reform."

Q: Could you say a little more about your work with Robin Farquharson? You gave a talk in Caen on this in the history of social choice conference.

Dummett:

The talk in Caen contains everything really I know about Farquharson. Certainly all the interaction I had with him. I told you in that talk, I think, about this dramatic episode when he entered the prize fellowship examination at All Souls. He quite certainly would have been elected but for the insane telephone conversation he had with the Warden on the eve of the election meeting -- the first manifestation of the mental illness from which he suffered for the rest of his life, and which the Warden revealed only at a late stage of the discussion, in strict compliance with the rules governing the discussion. That was tragic, I mean he really was very brilliant even though I discovered that he only got a second-class degree in Finals."
Perhaps he’d been concentrating too much on the theory of voting.

Q: And can you tell us also about your decision to submit the paper to Econometrica?

Dummett:

Oh, I have no explanation of that. Robin Farquharson said we should send it to "Econometrica", so I sent it to "Econometrica". That’s all. In answer to your earlier question about Robin Farquharson, I’ll just say something about that article. I can’t now remember who actually wrote the main body of the text. I mean, we wrote it together, but the machinery, the technical notions and technical vocabulary, that all came from him. There’s just one point that is of minor interest that I might mention. I think we used the word "situation" for an actual course of the voting, taking the voting procedure as given, whatever it might be. So, that would of course determine the outcome—which candidate was elected, which alternative was decided on. But I think it’s normal now to take the preference scales of the, let me say voters, as defined over a given set of, say, candidates or possible outcomes. We didn’t take that as given. What we took as given were the situations,
the courses of the voting, and with the preference scales defined over those. The
point of this was to allow for someone who says ‘I’d prefer that such and such a candidate would be elected, but I wouldn’t want him to be elected with a very narrow margin. Rather than that, I would prefer it to be someone else’. It allows for that possibility if you take the preference scales as defined over the situations in our sense. Then we could define a possible outcome as an equivalence class of situations under the relation that every voter is indifferent between the two. Anyway, as for the theorem, we assumed weak preference scales, allowing voters to be indifferent between situations. And the theorem was, if for every 3 possible outcomes there was one which no voter thought worse than the other 2, then the whole lot had a Condorcet winner (which we called a top). Now, I didn’t think of that theorem. Farquharson came to me with it as a "conjecture" and said, 'Can you prove this?', and I worked away for some days and came up with a proof and that’s contained in the little ‘Demonstration’ at the end of the paper. And as for that conjecture, well I don’t remember which of us proposed it first, but we agreed on it, and I say I stupidly thought it was far too difficult to prove.

Q: Although you have been interested in the practical aspects of voting, in your
first book on voting, Voting Procedures, you devote numerous pages to the more theoretical aspects of social choice including Arrow’s theorem and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.

Dummett:

Well, as for Arrow’s theorem, everyone says—certainly it’s historically
true, and I think it’s probably theoretically true—that it’s the basis of the whole
subject. You have to know that. I hadn’t meant to state a slightly different theorem
from that which Arrow proved; I included it because I agreed that it is fundamental."
As for the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, I thought it was essential to convince people of that. There have been advocates of specific electoral systems, in particular Single Transferable Vote, who have claimed that this system makes it impossible for anyone to gain any advantage by strategic voting. I thought it was absolutely essential to prove that there can’t be any such system, before discussing any particular system, because, if people think that it is possible to have a voting system that always denies advantage to strategic voting, they will have a wrong approach to the whole question. So, that’s why I put that in."

Q: I have two questions on Borda. Could you present for us first Borda’s rule,
the classical Borda rule, and second, your quota Borda system?

Dummett:

Well, the first one. Look, I have a pretty strong belief (qualified in a way that I’ll explain in a moment) that if you could compute the Borda score of the
candidates, as based on each individual’s true preferences, his real preferences, that would yield you an estimate of which candidate or which possible course of action was maximally acceptable for the whole body of voters, much more so than the Condorcet winner. The Borda score is of course computed by assigning, for each individual, 0 points for the candidate he least favours, 1 point for the candidate last but one on his preference scale, and so on upwards, and summing the scores each candidate thus obtains. I don’t have any belief in majorities, as such, for pretty obvious reasons. Well, one way of justifying the Borda count is to say that the distance on an individual’s preference scale between two alternatives, A and B, is a rough measure of the strength of the preferences; the way of estimating, as it were, cardinal preference from ordinal preference. As for its use as a practical method, especially if you’re just trying to select one course of action or elect one
candidate, I’m not at all sure of its merits. Because, quite apart from agenda manipulation, there is a temptation for people to vote tactically by putting the preferred candidate at the top and then the rest in inverse order of likelihood of being elected. Now, if a FEW people did that it would not disturb very much. If A LOT of people did that, it would produce a result that bears no relation to actual preferences, because the better they are at guessing which are the candidates likely to be elected, the more it would disturb them. By putting those likely to be elected at the bottom of their lists, and those not at all likely to be elected high up, they’re actually converting the popular candidates into unpopular candidates. So, I simply do not know, and I don’t know how we could actually find out, how much people could be tempted to vote tactically if the Borda count were used as a practical method. But, as a method of estimating from the true preferences of
the voters which candidate is the most generally acceptable, I think it ranks very highly. Now, one reason that it may not be perfect in that respect is exemplified precisely by this business of agenda manipulation (for instance by inserting a candidate who everyone will think slightly worse than the one you favour). In such a case -- I mean, described as I’ve just described it -- quite obviously, the preference for the one who’s slightly better over the one whom everyone ranks just below him is very slight, compared with most of the preferences the voters have.
That was what the paper I wrote was about. There has to be a method of estimating from the whole -- all the preference scales of the voters as between the alternatives -- which preferences are slight and which are strong, so that we don’t just count each one as of equal weight. The trouble is -- well, that paper I wrote showed that -- it makes it extremely complicated to compute the result. That’s a fatal disadvantage of using such a method in practice. It is essential to a voting system that the count should be simple to carry out and for the voters to understand. I haven’t thought about it since, I’m afraid. Some very simple method, or comparatively simple method, of computing the scores might be able to improve the way in which the Borda count reflects the strength of preferences. That’s all I have to say about that.

Q: And the quota system?

DUMMETT:

It seems to me that the great advantage of Single Transferable Vote is what it does for minorities. It it guarantees that the minorities get represented. Otherwise it has no advantages at all. It’s an almost chaotic system in the sense that a very small change in preferences would have results that change completely the outcome because it would affect the order in which candidates got eliminated, and so which votes were distributed at each stage. So, I think that it really is a very bad system, but it has this particular advantage. And I think the principle of trying to get what is maximally generally acceptable is overridden by the necessity that minorities should be represented. If a minority that considers itself to have
special needs (that is, things that matter particularly to it, but not to the general electorate), the worst thing for such a minority is the feeling that it has no voice; that there’s no one to speak for it. I mean, the representation of minorities that you get under Single Transferable Vote is not very great. It just means that in some multi-member constituencies large enough minorities get a representative. Of course, in the country as a whole, they won’t get a large
number of representatives. The Quota Borda system was intended to superimpose on the
Borda count this principle of identifying minorities by the way they voted. That is, they identify themselves when they all vote for the same two or three candidates in perhaps different orders, but they put them all at the top. That identifies the minority, and if it’s a sufficiently large minority (amounting to a quota, say the quota with Single Transferable Vote), then it’s bound to get represented. Under the Quota Borda system, the rule is that it gets represented. Out of, say, 3 candidates, who may all be voted for in different orders, you pick the one who has the highest Borda count. You don’t just leave it to the minority to pick their representative; their representative is the one who is maximally acceptable to the electorate as a whole. But, he may be one who would never get elected on a simple Borda system. The intention was to superimpose that idea for the representation of minorities
on the Borda system.

Q: What made you decide to write your second book on voting, Principles of
Electoral Reform?

Dummett:

I’ve got a very simple answer to that. As I said, my idea in the first book was to build this bridge. I decided that I had completely failed to do that. I said
in the "Introduction", quite truly, that I had assumed no mathematics except addition and multiplication. But I realised that what I had asked people to do was to think in a mathematical way, and they’re simply not prepared to do that. I decided that was the reason why I had failed to build a bridge, so I wrote this, as you say, more popular book in order to build a sort of bridge without ever actually proving any theorems, or giving any arithmetical examples, or anything of that kind, but just as a way of getting over some elementary principles.

Q: Can I follow up on that a little bit? You speak about your social justice
concerns (a very broad area) and how important it is for minorities to be given a voice. There’s some intuition that we all share—and why we are so in favour of democratic systems
versus oligarchic or dictatorial systems—that people should be represented, and we
have the idea that the vote is the way for individuals somehow to be represented; and
for people who represent us to act within our authority. So having your vote and having
your say is fundamentally important. And whenever you do give your representatives
authority to speak on your behalf, for example in the EU, United Nations, or wherever,
it is important that your vote as a citizen of your country is no less equal than that of a
citizen of any other country. Only a voting system that somehow captures that is going to
ensure that I, as an individual voter, am going to be appropriately represented. So it is a
fundamental necessity to try to get the voting system right. But we’ve failed all across the
board, nationally and internationally, to do this. Is it just the case, that because voting
theory is so technical and so mathematical and so outside of the domain of understanding
of our ruler types, that it’s not to be taken into consideration? I don’t think that there’s a
conspiracy to keep voting theorists away, but on the other hand I don’t think either that
it’s simply a failure to hear that voting theorists are knocking at the door. So to start
with, what are your thoughts about confronting these people, be it the politicians and
journalists, or first of all I suppose, the interested lay person? How do we become a voice
in a conversation with the interested lay person?

Dummett:

"I’m not sure I know the answer to that. I wish I did. I mean, the first thing is to convince people that devising an equitable voting system needs a lot of thought. They mostly don’t think that. They think it’s an easy thing. How you convince
people of that I really don’t know. Do you? I mean, I realise that you’re supposed to be interviewing me, but...

Q: Well, I have some ideas, but first, I suppose, is to get the intuition across of
the difference between the concept of voting weight versus the concept of voting power, that the voter or the representative of the voter possesses. This is usually counter-intuitive because the numerical weight doesn’t actually tell you what power the person has or hasn’t to influence the outcome of any decision. Now we can get across to people what the difference
is at an intuitive level. The trouble is, that it becomes so complex so quickly
that it requires technicians and computer power in order to make any sense of it all, and
politicians are reluctant to hand over influence to technicians. Perhaps you might agree
that the younger you introduce persons to the problem—perhaps not school children, but
somewhere along the line—you’ll get people at an early age to say ‘yes, this is a problem
I’d like to contribute to’. Only a tiny minority might go off that way, but at least everyone
will be confronted with it and be aware of it.

Dummett:

Okay. That means convincing people who teach political theory, politics, political science, whatever you call it, that they ought to pay attention, maybe learn,
so they can introduce their students to the question. University students you were speaking of?

QUESTION: Yes, I think school in the UK would be difficult. Perhaps in Europe and the
United States where you have civics courses it could probably be introduced quite early on without any technicality. At least the intuition could be got across that voting systems
are designed to make institutional governance work in a representative and democratic
fashion, but that there are all kinds of voting systems, and these have to be designed
with an idea of what it is that you want. These are the kind of ideas that could be got
across at the early stages. And then when you know things like Borda and Condorcet, an
introduction to the formality of the system may come later. Probably it would have to
be seriously discussed at a university course level, but where do you go? To the political
science department?

Dummett:

"Well, you have to convince those people, those who teach in the Political Science departments. That’s right. As for the Borda and Condorcet principles, those
ideas could be introduced at school. They’re very easy things to understand. But, as for attachment to the idea of majorities -- I mean, I think it’s very common to hear people say 'Well, we have to do what the majority wants, that’s democracy isn’t it?’—to disabuse people of that idea. Then we need to influence them away from votes with just two possible outcomes -- that’s where the belief in the majority comes from, from such votes where you can’t do anything but follow the majority. We had this ridiculous thing, I don’t know if you know. In the House of Commons they were discussing what form the House of Lords should take, once we had abolished the right of hereditary peers. How should the members of the House of Lords be appointed?" There were, I think, five different suggestions. Each was voted on separately, "Yes" or "No", instead of having them arranged in order of preference. The result, of course, was that they all failed! I think we need to encourage people to think more in favour of votes where there are a number of different possibilities and you
have to arrange them in order of preference. Then the questions arise, how do you decide? How do we begin to get people thinking seriously about these problems?"

Q: In your inaugural address of the Voting Power and Procedures program at LSE entitled Bridging the Gap, you said that there’s still a crying need for something to be done. When you spoke about the sort of persons who were in charge of adjudicating on the
forms of voting, you suggested the difficulty was that social choice or voting theory experts
have to drop any kind of technical jargon and terminology to become a voice in the conversation.
So I think the sort of tactic that you were suggesting was probably the right one.
I wanted to ask whether there might have been a tension between your
work as a philosopher and your involvement in social justice; that is, a tension between the fact that you are not a moral philosopher, but you are a moral practitioner.

Dummett:

"I’ve always thought that intellectuals, if they see a possibility -- which usually there isn’t -- of making a practical difference, they have the duty to try to do so. I was lucky, I was very lucky. Both my wife and I thought that I had ruined my career by involving myself in the struggle against racism, and therefore for some time not producing any work of my own, but just doing my teaching. I did think I’d thrown away my career, but luckily it didn’t work out that way."

Q: Yes, your interests in social justice certainly didn’t work out that way. I know
that most of my philosopher colleagues all think that Professor Sir Michael Dummett was knighted in 1999 because of his philosophical prowess but, correct me if I’m wrong, you were knighted for your work on racism.

Dummett:

Well, for BOTH actually. It was for contributions to philosophy and to
racial justice."

Q: So there wasn’t a tension as far as your ultimate accolade; they saw no tension
in it?

Dummett:

No, they didn’t. I was very glad to have THAT citation: for services to philosophy and racial justice."

Q: You answered one of the questions which I wanted to ask which was, I wondered
whether you believed that philosophers should, or perhaps stronger, whether they
had a duty or an obligation or responsibility in some way to take an active part in practical
life and make a difference where they can.
I mean in the sense perhaps that Wittgenstein,
whose influence you might have been under in your earlier days. . .

Dummett:

"Yes, I do believe that."

Q: ...would have probably taken a bit of the other stance and suggested that
you certainly don’t need philosophers dabbling in what people ought to be doing!

Dummett:

I suppose he would.

Q: But you turned against that. And among the great and influential philosophers --
of which you are certainly one -- I mean, the tradition brought by Russell and
Chomsky, and currently Peter Singer and so on, is to be involved. But you are in the
minority it must be said, particularly of analytical philosophers in this country.

Dummett:

Yes, that’s true. I’ve never tried to persuade anyone to take a different attitude. But you’re right that very few think that there’s any call on them to be
involved in any practical sense, and partly it’s a tradition in this country, I must say, and not only amongst philosophers. Well, I was very impressed recently, a few years back. I and various Italian philosophers, and other British ones as I recall it, we all published articles in an Italian daily newspaper on philosophy. Now, that’s unthinkable in this country, absolutely unthinkable. It is thinkable in France. But the idea that philosophers should write articles for newspapers! I mean, these weren’t articles on politics they were articles on philosophy. In France, and to a lesser extent in Italy, intellectuals generally and philosophers in particular are expected to make remarks on political and social questions. In this country, not. I remember very many years ago going with my wife to an exhibition in Paris of Picasso paintings, and I can’t remember where it was held. As we came down the stairs, on the wall facing us was a big plaque headed: Intellectuels morts pour la
France.’ I mean, we just laughed at the thought of ‘Intellectuals who died for England,’ or something like that! So, I think the whole atmosphere as a country (England) is against people like philosophers becoming involved. Russell was a very special case. When I was involved, none of those who were involved with me, thought of me as a philosopher, or even as an intellectual, but just as one of a number given to this work. It’s a whole attitude that we have here.

Q: Maybe it’s got something to do with the analytic tradition as it’s practised
particularly in the Anglophone world as compared with the continental tradition in which
man, and his place in society, and so on, is very much grist for the philosophers’ mill. I
want to go just a little bit into your work on racism and immigration. You wrote a book
in 2001 on immigration and refugees, and it’s pretty fair to say probably that immigration
and asylum have moved to the centre stage in world political discussion now. The standard
model that tends to be discussed is that we have rich countries and we have poor
countries (or poor countries that are persecuting, rogue states). Out of the poor countries
we have an economic migration, or out of the persecuting states we have asylum seekers,
refugees, and that’s the model. The rich states are trying to protect their populations
against this horde. Now you wrote your book and it is essentially in two parts, Principles
and History.8 In Part 1, Principles, you give a fairly uncompromising rights-based story
to govern the individual’s inviolable right to move to seek a better and decent life on the
one hand, and it’s on the recipient’s country whose door you are knocking on to give an
argument for why they should refuse you entry.

Dummett:

"Right, I think that is a fair brief summary of my ideas."

Q: In the second, the historical part, you say that roughly since the second world
war what we have underpinning all of this in trying to keep the movement of peoples down,
is a racism throughout Europe and the UK. So could you flesh this out, and the book, and
your sentiments about it?

Dummett:

Well, let me just say about the historical part, I think there was built up
in England an official encouragement of racism. The racist groups we had here (extreme racists), their demand was always for control on immigration, and that has always been the response of the government—to turn the screw tighter and tighter. By doing that, they very much encouraged the racist feeling that there was in the country because people obviously saw that tightening control against immigration -- and immigration was always thought of as COLOURED immigration, white immigrants from America and Australia weren’t really counted -- anyway, they saw that as a declaration. ‘We don’t want those people here!’. And that of course foments the racism of those who think, ‘We don’t want them here, they should all go.’ Now, there came a point when it was virtually impossible to turn the screw any tighter, and people were beginning to see through political parties’ claims to be able to do, or promises to do, that. And I think the politicians deliberately switched
this hostility against people of certain races, to hostility towards asylum seekers, and they started doing lots of propaganda about asylum seekers. I mean, our present government recently rejoiced in the reduction in the number of claims for asylum. And how did they achieve this reduction? Not by diminishing the persecution from which the refugees were fleeing. No. By preventing them from even ever getting here to make such claims! And that is now the popular demand, to reduce the number of asylum seekers admitted. That is just a transformation of the popular demand, to reduce coloured immigration, or reduce immigration which was understood to be coloured immigration. So, I think that the politicians have just switched this hostility which they helped to generate against people from the Caribbean, from the Indian sub-continent, and so on. They just switched it to asylum seekers. That’s a very good way of becoming popular. Hitler knew that. You identify some group as the enemy, and then you promise to do everything to keep the enemy out and you get votes that way. So, that’s about the historical thing you wanted me to talk about. I identify two grounds which a state might reasonably have for keeping people out,
for not accepting people who wanted to immigrate. One is very dangerous to talk about
because it’s part of the rhetoric of those who are against refugees, who say ‘we’re being swamped!’ Mrs Thatcher said it about immigrants from India and the Caribbean. ‘We’re being really rather swamped', she said on a national Tory broadcast. Well, I avoided using the word ‘swamped’, I used ‘submerged’, it’s something that does happen, not often but in particular cases. Tibet is a good example. There is a case when a country with a particular culture is threatened by having a lot of people who don’t share that culture coming in. Fiji is a very obvious example where that happened, when under the British Empire Indians were encouraged to come to Fiji in large numbers. I think, at one point, they were a greater number than the indigenous population. So, that’s one legitimate
ground for restricting immigration. I want to emphasize that that’s a rare situation, but I think it is a situation that does justify restricting the number of people who can enter. The other is over-population. I mean, you could say that many countries at the moment are overpopulated, but this should be judged according to the population density in the region of the world, say Western Europe or South East Asia or wherever. I think there can be a case for restricting entry of people if it’s going to lead to serious over-population in comparison with other countries in the region. Again, I don’t think that applies to any Western European country at the moment, but I think that is a legitimate ground for restricting entry. I think a state has to have a ground for restriction. You’re restricting people’s freedom to move where they want, and there has to be a reason for restricting anyone’s freedom. The question is never ‘Why should we allow someone to do that?’ The question is always ‘is there a reason to stop people from doing that?’. That has to be the
question. So, I also think under that picture you gave, what you call the usual model, I mean I actually think that advanced countries would probably mostly benefit from having a great deal more immigration than they have. That’s a factual matter."

Q: I think that’s right. I think it’s shown that the immigration numbers
are tiny. There are 2 to 5 percent (5 percent being the highest in any European country, 2 percent is probably one of the lowest) and what they contribute to the economy in terms
of taxes vastly outweighs any sort of ‘handouts’ that they’re meant to be receiving. So I
think the facts speak for that.

Dummett:

And what they contribute to their home countries too just by sending money back!

Q: Yes, I’ll come to that in a moment in fact, because that’s how Rawls thinks
the way things can go—I mean, he reaches opposite conclusions to you. You’re aware of the
book, The Law of Peoples.9 That was his Amnesty Lectures at Oxford in 1993, devoted to
the subject (you were perhaps aware of this even when you were writing your own piece).
He comes to an opposite conclusion here where he says that rich countries don’t have any
responsibility for the rights of poor countries, to allow them entry or whatever. Somehow
he seems to ground this on the idea that they’ve not tended to the economic base that
they’ve inherited, and in fact that they’re better off to stay where they are and emulate
the more prosperous countries in the process. I know which of the philosophies I would be
in favour of when comparing yours and what Rawls offers. Perhaps you’d like to comment.

Dummett:

"Well, Rawls simply thinks almost exclusively of single societies in effect
defined by the nation states we’ve had, and I don’t think one should think on that
basis. I think each one of us has duties to anyone in the world whether a fellow citizen or a citizen of some other country. I mean, if it comes to it and you can do something about it. Duties of states derive from duties of the citizens, and citizens have duties not only to their fellow countrymen but to anyone else in the world whose condition of life they can affect. So I think arguing in the way that you’ve just described is simply fallacious."

Q: Your contrary position to Rawls was such that his grounds are unfounded.

M. Dummett:

I think so. It’s not quite, but it’s very nearly the view that a state has
duties only to its own citizens, which is a view that I attacked very strongly in that book."

Q: A number of reviewers who picked up the book -- 2001 it was published -- suggested that at heart what was doing the work in your high ethical principle in the first part of the book, was your Catholicism and a Kantian
approach. Interestingly the Kantian approach was always regarded as what was doing
the work behind Rawls in Theory of Justice, but we won’t go down that route. I wanted to
talk to you a little bit about your Catholicism. As you know, I’ve interviewed Quine and
Davidson at great length (you in fact were part of the project with Davidson) and Strawson
too, and these are some of the most influential philosophers of the second part of the
twentieth century along with yourself, and were your contemporaries and your colleagues
in many instances too). They all proclaimed an atheism, not simply mentioned that they
were and that was it, but actually proclaimed it. That seems to me to be a thread that
runs through the analytical philosophy community; it seems almost to be regarded as a
pre-requisite. If one had any sort of moral leaning, this was some kind of humanism; some
secular activity was the ground for it, and atheism was pretty much the required card to
carry. You were brought up in the Anglican tradition at school, certainly at Winchester.
By your own proclamation, by the age of thirteen, you had become an atheist. At the age
of nineteen you joined the Roman Catholic Church where you’ve remained as a member
ever since. I just wanted to hear from you this rather refreshingly different presentation
of your religion.

M. Dummett:

Well, I mean, there wasn’t a tension between my work against racism and philosophy, they’re both very much connected in my own feeling with my religion. I think that it’s a duty to help the poor and oppressed if you can, and that springs very
much from, or I mean is a consequence of, a Christian view of the world. But you’re not asking me about that so much as generally. In philosophy, I think the duty of someone who has a religious belief as I have is to seek the truth. I mean, I know that people say that people with a religious belief adopt philosophical ideas because they think they know the answer already and it gives them grounds. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve never done any work in philosophy with a view to supporting my religious beliefs. I think the duty of the philosopher is simply to follow where the argument leads, if it appears to lead in a direction against his beliefs, he just has to leave it there and say ‘there must be an answer to this’ or ‘I must have gone wrong somewhere, I don’t know where’. I agree that, particularly in America, it’s not just atheism, it’s straightforward materialism that has become almost axiomatic among analytic philosophers. That used not to be the case here. I remember years ago there was a series of Wolfson lectures (lectures sponsored by Wolfson College); there were six. Quine and Davidson were among the lecturers, so there are two
atheists for you. As it happened, all the other four were Catholics. There were myself, Peter Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe and Dagfinn Føllesdal (It’s not generally known that he’s a Catholic, but he is). So, we had four Catholics and two atheists."
It used not to be the case here that religious belief was so rare among philosophers-- there are still one or two like myself -- but I don’t know whether that’s the increasing influence of American philosophy or just chance. I do think that in philosophy -- well, I believe in metaphysics (I haven’t done much work in metaphysics, and I think a great deal of metaphysics is
basically the philosophy of physics), that metaphysics is concerned with clarifying our conception of the universe in which we live. Whereas a lot of other philosophy is concerned with clarifying theories about ourselves, about intention, about emotion and so on. So, I think that philosophy needs to be pursued by . . . I mean if you declare yourself as an atheist or a materialist, you’re just as much giving the conclusion in advance, in fact rather more than if you declare your adherence to a religious faith.

Q: It seems somehow that the mind-body distinction in philosophy of mind and
consciousness studies has been a sort of bogeyman. The reduction programme to single
state materialism would leave no room for the spiritual sphere, that’s on one side. There’s
also another tension, the explosion of Marxism, again for different reasons, sending one
off on the atheistic path. I wondered if you agree that neither of those two things really
touches the concepts of metaphysics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of mathematics,
logic and the technicalities of the subject.

Dummett:

Well, I agree, they are irrelevant. I think all this concentration on the
notion of consciousness is because it seems the last obstacle to oppose to a materialist reduction of reality, I think that’s a kind of inheritance from Cartesian dualism. Questions like, ‘What is consciousness for?', What is the point of there being such a thing as consciousness?' -- I think those are ridiculous questions. I think they are questions which come from a kind of dualism in the first instance. They want everything. They want to arrive at Monism, but they can’t quite get there.

Q: Finally, we want to talk a little bit about a passion, or a pleasure—your
interest in tarot cards.

Dummett:

Well, my interest in the first place was in the games -- it more than
any other kind of card game -- the history of the cards is a tool to the history of the games. Well, you want to ask me why I’m interested. I don’t think anyone should be interested in the subject who doesn’t enjoy playing cards, because this is an enormous family of very interesting and often very intricate games. I’ll give two examples. In Bologna, they play a game with the local form of the Tarot pack. It’s for four fixed partners, as in Bridge, and the greater part of the scores at the end of the hand comes from the multitude of different combinations of cards that you and your partner have in the tricks that they’ve won. So, it’s not like Bridge where you’re just concentrating on making so many tricks. Two-thirds of the cards in the pack can contribute to these combinations, and so you’re trying to win
such combinations, and prevent your opponents from getting them. So, almost every single card matters. All right, that’s one fascinating form of the game. In Bologna, they play with 62 cards. In Hungary, they play with only 42. You have 22 fixed trumps and only 5 cards per plain suit. Through very strict rules governing the
bidding, you can often tell a great deal about what cards people have in their hands. And, the thing is, you get a certain score. You have partners, but the partners are not fixed. They’re determined by the declarer. The successful declarer calls a card, which he doesn’t have in his hand, and the player who has that card becomes his partner, but he doesn’t say so. And so, until that card is played, you don’t know for sure who is whose partner. Besides the score you get for winning the game, there are also scores for all sorts of feats you can get in play like winning the last trick with the smallest trump, winning the two top trumps and the bottom trump and so on. The most valuable is winning the second highest trump with the highest trump. Now, sometimes it’s worth not winning the game in order to make one of these feats. You’ll score more that way. So, again, when you start,
it’s not certain what the objective of the declarer and his unknown partner is going to be. Well, that’s another example of a really fascinating game. I got interested in all this in a very odd way. We were on holiday in France. We bought a tarot pack. There were rules of the game with the pack. We started playing with our family. We thought it was a very good game. When I was back in England, I came across an Austrian pack with rules and this was an obviously related, but a very different game. So, I wrote to various people asking if they could tell me how the game was played in other countries. I wrote to experts on card games. None of them could tell me. So, I started trying to find out for myself, and it gradually grew into a serious piece of research. Trying to discover the history. I mean, there are written rules of games from the seventeenth century onwards, but before that, there are just some literary allusions. So, it really becomes a piece of serious detective work, and that’s part of the fascination. I’ll give you an example of a puzzle. I know a lot of people who are collectors of playing cards. In the 1930s—this is quite a
short time ago -- there was a kind of tarot pack. My collector had the wrapping and it was written in French, "Tarot `a soixante treize cartes’, or possibly ‘septante trois cartes’. It was just like an ordinary Austrian pack, so that the suits had 8 cards in each suit, but instead of 21 numbered trumps it had 40 numbered trumps. Now, it’s still a total mystery, it’s mystery I’d love to solve. In some French-speaking parts of Europe they played this game. I mean, these packs have not been made since the 1930s. We wrote to the manufacturer and they had a record of making these packs, but not where they were sold. So, I still don’t know who played it or why. So there are all sorts of problems of this kind. So, I enjoy playing. I enjoy meeting people who play. That’s a very good way to meet people, and I’ve done a lot of this in Sicily. In Sicily, the game only survives in four scattered towns, in each of which it’s become a local tradition . . .

Q: Which towns -- can I ask?

Dummett:

Oh, you know Sicily? Calatafimi, Mineo (do you know Mineo? It’s a small town south-west of Catania), Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (near Messina) and Tortorici, inland. In about 1900 you could still play it all over the island. But now, if you ask anyone in Palermo, no one has heard of it. Just in these four places. I mean, they play
differently but the substrate of the basic rules are the same. And it’s different from any other tarot game played elsewhere. So, I enjoy that part of it: going and meeting people who play, and they teach me the game. So, it became a sort of passion. The fortune telling and occult part of it has never been my principal interest, but I wrote a chapter, in the first book l wrote on tarot, on the occult use of the tarot for fortune-telling, taking it up to about 1920. I had to do some work for that. But then I thought, it’s a chapter which no one interested in that subject will ever see, and no one interested in card games would take any notice of.
So, I thought of extracting it and finding someone to bring it up to date,
and publish the result as a book. Then Donald Laycock, an Australian anthropologist,
sent me an article that he’d written on modern occultist tarot packs. So I wrote to him, suggesting he should collaborate with me and bring the history down to the present. And he agreed. But while I was in California I received a pathetic letter from him saying, 'I have contracted a form of leukaemia and can no longer work'. Very soon after writing it, he died. I obtained a new collaborator, Ronald Decker, and we enlisted a third, French, collaborator, Thierry Depaulis. It was going to be a single book bringing the history down to the present, but it turned into two, because it got too long. So, I went on with the second volume in collaboration with Ronald Decker, who did the largest part of the work. And even then we only reached 1970.

Q: S, the two books were, the first was A Wicked Pack Of Cards and the second
was called?

Dummett:

"A History of the Occult Tarot 1870-1970." 1970 was when there was a great explosion. Before that people were content to choose just one occultist tarot pack
out of the few that existed. Now all these different occultist packs were being produced: witches’ tarot and feminist tarot, native American tarot, Basque tarot, Japanese tarot -- tarots from every culture that had never had anything to do with it, and people started collecting occultist tarots.

Q: And completed a third book.

Dummett:

"Ah, that is about the game of tarot! Or, rather the many games. The largest part of it consists of detailed rules of the different games, as played now or in the
past. This is essentially bringing up to date my The Game of Tarot of 1980; so much has been discovered, not only by me, since then. So this new book is just called A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack; it’s in two volumes, because it’s an enormous family of games. It is historical as well as covering games played at the present day.

Q: Is it published?

M. Dummett:

It was published, yes. I’m sorry I haven’t got a copy of it here. Anyway,
only real enthusiasts would buy that book!

Q: I must say it’s extremely refreshing to hear that the former Wykeham Professor
of Logic and one of the foremost practitioners in philosophy of mathematics and
logic has actually been co-authoring with Ronald Decker, who is, I think, curator of the
playing-card museum at the American Playing Card Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s
an absolutely fascinating part of your life.
M
. Salles: Do you still play tarot?

Dummett:

Well, the trouble is, we used to have a little club in Oxford which I
founded years ago. Now, it’s disintegrated. I mean: some of them left Oxford; some of them died. So, I don’t have that anymore. All I have is a computer programme for playing French tarot. Well, it’s not so much fun as playing with real people, of course. But I sometimes beat those three little men in the computer!

---

M. A. E. Dummett, R. I. P.

Grice and Dummett

2012-01-13T06:48:00.001-08:00

Speranza

Dummett undaunted

From the Guardian:

"I am struck by how many of the obituaries of Sir Michael Dummett (Obituary, 28 December) feel obliged to mention his "irascibility", his "volcanic temper" and similar unlikely metaphors."

"I knew Sir Michael for nearly half a century."

"What I most remember about him as a person is his gentleness and his stern attachment to tolerance."

"It is true that he could indulge in the most un-Oxford-don-like gestures – a quality he inherited no doubt from the one philosopher he admired both as a philosopher and as a human being – GEM ("Elizabeth") Anscombe."

"Just as she had marched up to the dais during an honorary degree presentation in the late 1950s to some American political dignitary (Dean Rusk?) in protest at the US use of nuclear bombs in Japan, there was one occasion when a visiting Conservative MP, Ronald Bell, noted for the virulence and persistence of his racism, was nonplussed when Sir Michael marched up to the platform, tore the microphone from him and delivered an extempore denunciation of Bell's views."

"But on another occasion when I was speaking and explained where I stood on just how far one could tolerate cultural and religious difference, Michael, from the rear of the hall, took issue with me root and branch but without the slightest acrimony."

"We'd always agreed that often the most fruitful (ie productive) disagreements are not those between polar opposites, but between disputants who shared enough in common to understand all that the disagreement implied and excluded."

"That is the Michael Dummett I shall always remember – a philosopher's philosopher, yes, but before everything an intensely human man."

Dipak Nandy, Nottingham

"Although I never met Michael Dummett again after 1965, when I had attended a meeting at his home in Oxford, I could never forget him."

"I was the (unpaid) organising secretary of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination founded a few months before, and he was a founder of the Oxford Committee for Racial Integration."

"We hit it off immediately, and he told me of his visit to the south of the US, when he witnessed the sheriff and his men using electric cattle prods against black civil rights demonstrators."

"The much praised Alistair Cooke was reporting the confrontation for the Guardian but never seemed to leave his hotel room. Instead, Michael said, Cooke invited not the campaigners but the sheriff to visit him. Michael was not merely annoyed or unhappy to read Cooke's inaccurate accounts, but outraged: a sign of someone deeply anti-racist (when it was far from trendy). Michael complained to the Guardian on his return to England but got little satisfaction."

"Then he was asked to do a talk on philosophy for the Third Programme (now Radio 3), and agreed on condition that he could also give a talk on what really happened in Alabama, which had been inaccurately reported in the British press."

"The producer agreed and Michael got the satisfaction of (belatedly) spilling the beans on the sheriff and on the eminent journalist."

"Truth for Michael was more than a philosophic concept. When comes such another?"

Selma James, London

"Michael Dummett was an uncompromising and effective campaigner for equal rights for immigrants. His involvement in practical anti-racist politics and his recognition that immigration was becoming a focus of racist activity led him to co-found the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants in 1967, which he chaired in 1970-71, the same year he became one of the founding trustees of the associated Immigrants' Aid Trust (IAT). This coincided with the enactment of the foundation stone of modern British immigration laws in the Immigration Act 1971, and Michael remained closely involved in immigration politics his entire life, using his fierce intellect to promote equality for all immigrants."

"In On Immigration and Refugees (2001) Michael synthesised his more abstract philosophical studies with his political work. Until his last illness he remained an active trustee of the IAT. His was a thoughtful and vital presence at trustees' meetings, where he was always ready to alert other trustees to important issues, being particularly exercised about the plight of refugees and Immigration Act detainees, and the importance of migrants and refugees having access to good legal advice. His insights and kindness will be missed."

Alison Stanley, Chair, Immigrants' Aid Trust

The Turing Test, the Grice Test

2012-01-13T06:20:00.000-08:00

Speranza

---

From the Stanford Encyclopedia:

"In a seminal paper (Turing 1950), A.M. Turing proposed that the question, “Can machines think?” can be replaced by the question, “Is it theoretically possible for a finite state digital computer, provided with a large but finite table of instructions, or program, to provide responses to questions that would fool an unknowing interrogator into thinking it is a human being?”"

"Now, in deference to its author, this question is most often expressed as “Is it theoretically possible for a finite state digital computer (appropriately programmed) to pass the Turing Test?” (See Turing Test entry)"

"In arguing that this question is a legitimate replacement for the original (and speculating that its answer is “yes”),

Turing identifies

"thoughts"

with

_states_ of a system,

defined solely by their
roles in producing
further internal states *and*
verbal outputs, a view that has much in common with contemporary functionalist theories.

Indeed, Turing's work was explicitly invoked by many theorists during the beginning stages of 20th century functionalism, and was the avowed inspiration for a class of theories, the “machine state” theories most firmly associated with Hilary Putnam (1960, 1967) that had an important role in the early development of the doctrine."

Grice's Philosophical Psychology draws from Turing

2012-01-13T06:18:00.001-08:00

Speranza

--- Why wouldn't it?

The Universal Turing Machine; the universal Grice machine

2012-01-13T06:16:00.001-08:00

Speranza

Self-Consciousnesswww.jstor.org/stable/2998342

31n "Method in Philosophical Psychology" (Proceedings and Addresses of. 69 .... would require that A be (equivalent to) a Turing machine table; others find this ...

Ned Block on the Universal Turing Machine alla Grice

2012-01-13T06:15:00.001-08:00

Speranza

Troubles with Functionalismw3.uniroma1.it/cordeschi/Articoli/block.htm

The point is at its clearest with regard to Turing-machine versions of ...... Grice, H. P. Method in philosophical psychology (from the banal to the bizarre). ...

Turing and Grice's "Method in philosophical psychology"

2012-01-13T06:14:00.001-08:00

Speranza

Locus classicus: Grice 1975(a).

Grice and Turing

2012-01-13T06:06:00.000-08:00

Speranza

Grice relies on a functionalist theory of mind alla Turing in his "Method in philosophical psychology."

This from wiki, functionalism (philosophy of mind).

Types of functionalism

Machine-state functionalism

Figure:

Artistic representation of a Turing machine.

The broad position of "functionalism" can be articulated in many different varieties.

The first formulation of a functionalist theory of mind was put forth by Hilary Putnam.[5][6]

This formulation, which is now called "machine-state functionalism" (or "machine functionalism" for short) was inspired by the analogies which Putnam and others noted between the mind and the theoretical "machines" or computers capable of computing any given algorithm which were developed by Turing (a "Universal Turing machine").

In non-technical terms, a "universal Turing machine" can be visualized as an indefinitely and infinitely long tape divided into rectangles (the memory) with a box-shaped scanning device that sits over and scans one component of the memory at a time.

Each unit is either blank (B) or has a 1 written on it.

These are the inputs to the machine. The possible outputs are:

1. Halt: Do nothing.

2. R: move one square to the right.

3. L: move one square to the left.

4. B: erase whatever is on the square.

5. 1: erase whatever is on the square and print a '1.

An extremely simple example of a universal Turing machine which writes out the sequence

111

after scanning three blank squares and then stops is specified by the following machine table:

State One State Two State Three

B write 1

stay in state 1 write 1

stay in state 2 write 1

stay in state 3

1 go right

go to state 2 go right

go to state 3

halt

This table states that if the machine is in state one and scans a blank square (B), it will print a 1 and remain in state one.

If it is in state one and reads a 1, it will move one square to the right and also go into state two.

If it is in state two and reads a B, it will print a 1 and stay in state two.

If it is in state two and reads a 1, it will move one square to the right and go into state three.

If it is in state three and reads a B, it prints a 1 and remains in state three.

Finally, if it is in state three and reads a 1, then it will stay in state three.

The essential point to consider here is the nature of the states of the universal Turing machine.

Each state can be defined exclusively in terms of its relations to the other states as well as inputs and outputs.

State one, for example, is simply the state in which the machine, if it reads a B, writes a 1 and stays in that state, and in which, if it reads a 1, it moves one square to the right and goes into a different state.

This is the

"functional definition"

of state one.

It is its causal role in the overall system.

The details of how it accomplishes what it accomplishes and of its material constitution are completely irrelevant.

According to "Machine-state Functionalism,"

the nature of a mental state is just like the nature of the automaton states described above.

Just as state one simply is

the state in which, given an input B, such

and such happens, so"

"being in pain" (or thinking that Christmas is white)

is the state which disposes one to cry "ouch"

-- or sing, "I'm thinking of a white Christmas") become distracted, wonder what the cause is, and so forth.

An Interview with Grice -- and an interview with Michael Dummett

2012-01-11T14:32:00.000-08:00

Speranza

Excerpts from:

Dummett, M. A. E. -- in

Fara, R., and Salles, M.

"AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL DUMMETT"

"FROM ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY TO VOTING ANALYSIS -- AND BEYOND"

"Social choice and welfare economics are subjects at the frontier of many disciplines."

"Even if economics played the major rˆole in their development, sociology, psychology and,
principally, political science, mathematics and philosophy have been central for the manifold
inventiveness of the employed methods and for the diversity of the studied topics."

"This phenomenon can be compared with game theory, a subject which has, of course,
many connections with social choice and welfare."

"This fact is reflected by the disciplinary origins of the contributors to the subject and, as an anecdote, by the disciplinary origins
of the board of editors of this journal."

"Philosophers are expected to contribute mainly to
the study of social justice and related ethical questions."

"But there is a tradition among
logicians for studying voting theory."

"A famous example is C. L. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll),
even though the complete works of Dodgson on voting occupy only a few pages."

"A major
recent example is Professor Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett, Wykeham professor of Logic."

"Michael Dummett is famous among social choice
theorists for his joint paper with Robin Farquharson published in Econometrica in 1961."

"Later he wrote two important books on voting (Dummett (1984, 1997)."

"For an overview see
Salles (2006))."

"But it must be outlined that Michael Dummett is also, and above all, one
of the greatest contemporary philosophers whose work on the German logician Frege, on
intuitionism, realism, anti-realism, justificationism has been central for the development of
analytical philosophy in the second part of the last century and in this century (an example
is the Symposium in a recent issue of Mind (see Peacocke (2005) and Dummett (2005)).1

Sir Michael Dummett was Wykeham Professor of Logic emeritus at Oxford University.

This interview was conducted at New College, Oxford in September 2004.

2. THe Interview

M. Salles:

Q:

Could you tell us a little about the origin of your interest in philosophy in
general and in analytic philosophy, logic, and philosophy of mathematics in particular?

DUMMETT:

"Well, my interest in PHILOSOPHY, and
in particular ANALYTIC philosophy,
simply derives from my study as an
undergraduate."

"I had a HISTORY scholarship to the
Oxford college of Christ Church
which I gained in 1943."

"Then I went into the army and I
was four years in the army."

"Two years during the war and two years
after the war."

"When I came out I realised that
I’d forgotten a large amount of the history
that I’d learnt at school."

"So I thought it would be a
mistake to read history."

"And I decided to read philosophy,
politics and economics."

"I’d read a little philosophy and been interested in it, but not yet gripped by it, and I thought it would be very useful to know both politics and economics."

"I was absolutely gripped by the philosophy that I studied as an undergraduate,
and that became my overriding interest."

"It was Analytic Philosophy that
was absolutely dominant in Oxford, and
indeed throughout Britain I think at that time,
so that was the

[The authors gratefully acknowledge that work on this paper was partly supported by the Leverhulme Trust (Grant F/07-004M). We would like to thank Liz Docherty who remarkably made the basic tape transcription].

[All footnotes and references have been added by the interviewers.

For Dummett’s works in philosophy and logic see Dummett (1978, 1981, 1981a, 1991, 1991a, 1991b, 1993, 1993a, 2000, 2004, 2005))

---

kind of philosophy I learnt to do."

"I’ve always remained an analytic philosopher."

"But as for logic and the philosophy of mathematics,
that’s a separate thing."

"It happened, well, again, quite
accidentally."

"I took, the first time it was set, an optional
paper in Philosophy
in my final examination."

"It was one invented by
J. L. Austin and it was called,
ABSURDLY,
"The Origins of Modern Epistemology.""

"What it was was a collection (a rather large collection)
of texts, starting with Plato’s "Theaetetus", and finishing with Frege’s "Foundations
of Arithmetic"".

"These were texts which one would NOT normally have come across during
the ordinary

"Philosophy, Politics and Economics" course in Oxford, and I worked my way
through these."

"I was very interested by a lot of them but I was absolutely bowled over
by the Foundations of Arithmetic, and I thought, I want to read everything this man has written."

"I thought it was the most brilliant work of its length, that I had ever come across."

"So when I got elected as a prize fellow of All Souls College I started to read everything that Frege had written."

"Very little was translated into English at that time, so I had to read it in German, and naturally since he was the founder of modern mathematical logic
and a lot of his writing was about logic in general, philosophical logic, but also it all was directed at the Philosophy of Mathematics, so I decided I must learn some mathematics and some mathematical LOGIC."

"Well, as far as mathematics was concerned, I planned to
do an undergraduate course in mathematics and to take the final examination, but the
Warden of All Souls -- I mean, in those days such figures had much more authority than they do now, you did what they said -- forbade me to read the Mathematics School, on the grounds that if I didn’t get a first class degree in the subject, it would shame the college."

"So I found someone, John Hammersley, a mathematician, who very kindly gave
me tutorials in the subject (although I wasn’t going to take the examination) and I read a certain amount of mathematics for myself."

*************

"As for Mathematical Logic,
there was, I thought, no one in Oxford at
that time who could teach it to me."

[----- WHAT ABOUT GRICE???? Speranza]

"So I went and spent a year at Berkeley,
California."

************** (There was GRICE!)

"Berkeley was then much the best
for Mathematical Logic."

"It was done both in
the Mathematics and in the
Philosophy departments, and Tarski of course was there."

---

R. Fara:

Michael, it would be helpful if perhaps we just had a few dates here.

So, when are we talking about?

M. Dummett:

"Yes."

"I came up to Oxford in 1947."

"I took my finals in 1950 and sat
the All Souls examination for prize
fellowships in the same year, and was lucky enough
to be elected."

"It was in 1955 that I went to Berkeley."

"When I came back I retained my
interest in the philosophy of mathematics generally, not just in Frege."

"I was always very
interested in Frege’s work, and I’ve written about it a good deal, but, studying different philosophies of mathematics, I came upon Brouwer and the whole intuitionist school and became very interested in that."

"In about 1963 the position of Reader in the Philosophy
of Mathematics became vacant -- it had been held by Friedrich Waismann who had been
a member of the Vienna Circle."

"He had come to England as a refugee from Hitler, and he
had been Reader in the Philosophy of Mathematics, but he switched to become Reader in
the Philosophy of Science so that the position was open and I was lucky enough to get it."

"I held the post for thirteen years."

"I lectured on that subject and we got the new Honours
School in Mathematics and Philosophy for undergraduates started."

"I took a large part in
the foundation of that, and then had to do an enormous amount of teaching for it because we loaded it with Mathematical Logic."

"So I had to do about twice as much lecturing as
the university required in order to cover it all."

"Then we got Robin Gandy -- he was Reader in Mathematical Logic -- and later we had Dana SCOTT as Professor of the subject."

"So the burden of teaching was very much lightened after these people came."

"Also I gave courses in Philosophy of Mathematics."

"So for 13 years that was my principal obligation to the university."

"Of course I kept up an interest in philosophy in general, in philosophy of language
and its effect on metaphysics."

"Those were my interests outside the philosophy of mathematics but that wasn’t what I was professionally doing."

M. Salles:

The readers of Social Choice and Welfare are mainly economists, and most
of them ignore that you are one of the most famous philosophers.

Could you describe your work in philosophy, even if this seems quite impossible in a short time?

M. Dummett:

"Well, I’ll do my best."

"A very, very brief answer."

"I have a kind of side interest in the philosophy of time."

"One of the first things I published was an article arguing
that backwards causation (where the cause comes after the effect) was not logically impossible."

"I suppose that the principal interest I’ve had, and certainly what I’m best known
for, is a critique of realism and the

truth-conditional theory of meaning that underlies it."

"That is, the theory that the MEANING of a statement consists in the condition for it to be true."

"Now, what we learn when we learn a language is what counts as establishing a statement as true."

"Not, in general, by observation but, more usually, by inference from premisses
established by observation."

"We also learn what you’re committed to by accepting a statement as true."

"That’s the practice of speaking a language."

"But the Realist position normally involves the Principle of Bivalence: that every unambiguous statement is determinately either true or false."

"On that position, the being true of the statement can go beyond what we are capable of recognizing."

"But what we are capable of recognizing consists in our ability to recognize whether the statement is established as true."

"The simplest possible example is this."

"It’s normally assumed, a realist assumption, that the magnitude of any
physical quantity is absolutely determinate and exact, that’s to say that it would be given in terms of some suitable unit, by a real number which might be rational or irrational."

"We can never discover that."

"We can only measure to within a margin of error."

"So there is a statement which is true but which we are incapable ever of recognizing as true."

"There are plenty of such statements, and I want to question, I have questioned, how we can come by such a notion as that of a statement as being true, independently of our being able to recognize it as true?"

"And how can we manifest possession of such a concept, and in any case, in what does it consist?"

"It seems to me that there is a circularity."

"You explain what it is to grasp the proposition expressed by a statement, in terms of your grasp of another proposition; namely that it would be true under such and such conditions."

"That can’t be manifested in the actual practice of using the language, because all that manifests is your capacity to recognize it, to recognize the statement as true in favourable cases."

"So, if you reject this realist account, this truth-conditional theory of meaning, you have to have a DIFFERENT theory of meaning which I call justificationist (to understand a statement is to know what would justify you in asserting it, in other words being able to recognize it as true)."

"And if you take that as your account of meaning, you have to jettison this principle
of bivalence because there are statements for which we have no means of recognizing
whether they’re true or false, so you can’t assume that every statement is either true or false."

"I mean you’re now identifying truth with the existence of something whereby we
could recognize a statement as true."

"That means that you have to reject classical logic in favour of what’s usually called intuitionist logic."

"So, now, I’ve never actually identified myself with a denial, a rejection of realism, I’ve been concerned simply to pose a challenge
to the realist standpoint and ask how it can answer these questions that I’ve posed about how do we get the concept of being true, and also to work out the implications of denying realism and adopting the justificationist theory of meaning."

"What effect does that have on metaphysics essentially?"

"Is it coherent?"

"I mean: are there problems which show it to be untenable?"

"So that has been my major interest."

"I’ve written a great deal also about the philosophy of Frege, I’ve retained my admiration for and interest in his work, so that is exegesis."

"It’s exegesis which brings you to the frontiers of the subject, I think."

QUESTION (R. Fara):

"If I may summarize, would it be fair to say then that the intuitionism in a
sense underpins the anti-realism?"

Dummett:

"Yes."

QUESTION (R. Fara):

"So, would your take be something along the lines of Quine, who never denied
that there are other possible logics—in fact nothing was ever sacrosanct in his view—but just basically that you were stuck with bivalence because it got you the results that you required in science, and it was simplicity that was at stake?"

"And are you saying in a sense that we shouldn’t just draw boundaries, and we shouldn’t be so quick and content
to retain boundaries."

"That maybe we should just look a little bit further forward to see
what we might come up with if we put the full support towards something other than
bivalence? Is that a fair position of where you stand?

Dummett:

"Yes, yes."

R. Fara:

"Of course you recognize bivalence and its power in what it does in
mathematics, but what would happen if?"

M. Dummett:

"Right, yes, exactly."

Salles:

"Another possibility to deny bivalence would be to accept multivalence."

Dummett:

"Yes, but that’s not the way that I’ve gone actually."

"In Intuitionist Logic you can’t assert of any statement that it is neither true nor false, that would be for the intuitionist a contradiction."

"What you can’t do is to assume that it is determinately one or the other."

QUESTIN (R. Fara):

"Yes, ‘it’s P or not P’ is what is rejected."

Dummett:

"Yes, right, and you can’t ever close off the possibility that something
will be shown to be true."

"It may be very unlikely that it is, but there could always be
evidence that would turn up."

"So you can’t close it off."

QUESTION (Salles):

"What leads a major philosopher to devote a significant time to social choice
and voting theory?"

M. Dummett:

"Ah, well there’s a very short answer to that."

"I don’t see why one shouldn’t be interested in more than one thing."

"I think it’s a pity in fact to concentrate just on one thing, so..."

QUESTION: M. Salles:

Yes, concentrate, I agree, but still . . .

M. Dummett:

"It’s not that I see any link between them."

"It’s just that they both interest me."

QUESTION (M. Salles):

So could you describe your work in social choice and welfare?

Dummett:

"Well, it’s been very spasmodic."

"I was first interested in the theory of voting as such."

"I still think that the application to voting is the salient kind of application
that social choice theory has had up to now, although it’s much more general than that as a theory."

"I was first interested in the theory of voting by Robin Farquharson who was a
very brilliant young man and had become interested in the theory of voting while he was still an undergraduate."

"I knew him well, and then we wrote a paper together and that
was my first contribution to the subject, in print anyway."

"John Hicks who, as professor, was a Fellow of All Souls at the same time as I was, congratulated me on having a paper published in "Econometrica"."

"Well, then as you know Robin Farquharson fell victim to this
awful mental illness and couldn’t really do any more creative work."

"I retained an interest in Social Choice Theory and I followed it a bit because people sent me offprints of articles which I read, but I didn’t make any attempt to keep up with the subject systematically."

"I was still very interested in the theory of voting and very interested by the absurdity of many of the voting procedures adopted within my college, and in other colleges, and
indeed in electoral systems, but I didn’t really attempt to do any more work in the subject."

"I very much regret that I didn’t because of that conjecture that we made in the Econometrica
article, that no voting system could exclude the possibility of successful strategic
voting, which was established by Gibbard and later Satterthwaite.2"

"I believed that that
would be a terribly difficult thing to prove, but actually I don’t think it was so difficult to
prove as the theorem we proved in the article."

"I just had this impression that it would be frightfully difficult to prove."

"So I never attempted to do so."

"Then I conceived the idea of
writing this book which I published named Voting Procedures, and I thought well, if I’m
going to write this I’ll have to get myself up to date in the subject of social choice theory."

"Luckily it happened that Amartya Sen, whom I knew quite well, had written a resum´e of the history of social choice (I don’t know if he ever published it), and he lent this to me
and I studied it carefully.3"

"Then I started to write the book."

"The idea behind the book
was to make a bridge between social choice theory which was studied mostly as you say by
economists who published papers and proved all sorts of theorems, and the people practically
concerned with the devising of voting procedures—I mean politicians, members of
boards of directors and so on, most of whom were completely unaware that there was any
such thing as social choice theory, that anyone ever studied the theory of voting."

"I wanted to build such a bridge."

"It wasn’t, I’m ashamed to say, until I read Amartya Sen’s history
of social choice theory that I became aware that the conjecture which we had made in that paper (about the non-existence of strategy proof procedures) had actually been proved."

"Now, Sen mentioned both Gibbard and Satterthwaite as having proved it, but didn’t give the proof."

"So, I became aware that it could be proved, and that it wasn’t too difficult
for anyone to prove."

"So I sat down and produced a proof of my own."

"I hadn’t yet even looked at Gibbard’s paper and, as I say, I felt extremely annoyed when I found it because I thought I could have done this at any time."

"Since then I’ve done very little except that
one paper which you published (in Social Choice and Welfare) about the Borda count.4"

"That’s the sum-total I’m afraid of my contribution to the subject."

"I know you liked my book, and I’m quite proud of it myself, but that’s all I’ve done: the first article, and the book, a little article later, and also a more popular book called Principles of Electoral Reform."

QUESTION (M. Salles):

Could you say a little more about your work with Robin Farquharson?

You gave a talk in Caen on this in the history of social choice conference.5

Dummett:

"Yes, yes, right."

"Well, the talk in Caen contains everything really I
know about Farquharson . . . certainly all the interaction I had with him."

"I told you in that talk, I think, about this dramatic episode when he entered the prize fellowship examination at All Souls."

"He quite certainly would have been elected but for the insane
telephone conversation he had with the Warden on the eve of the election meeting -- the first manifestation of the mental illness from which he suffered for the rest of his life, and which the Warden revealed only at a late stage of the discussion, in strict compliance with the rules governing the discussion."

"That was tragic, I mean he really was very brilliant
even though I discovered that he only got a second-class degree in Finals."

"Perhaps he’d been concentrating too much on the theory of voting!"

2Gibbard (1973), Satterthwaite (1975).

3

(Michael Dummett most probably makes reference to a typescript eventually published in 1986 as a
chapter in the Handbook of Mathematical Economics (see, Sen (1986))).

4Dummett (1998)
5Dummett (2005a)

QUESTION (M. Salles):

And can you tell us also about your decision to submit the paper to Econometrica?

M. Dummett:

"Oh, I have no explanation of that."

"Robin Farquharson said we should send it to "Econometrica", so I sent it to "Econometrica"."

"That’s all."

"In answer to your earlier question about Robin Farquharson, I’ll just say something about that article."

"I can’t now remember who actually wrote the main body of the text."

"I mean, we wrote it together, but the machinery, the technical notions and technical vocabulary, that all came from him."

"There’s just one point that is of minor interest that I might mention."

"I think we used the word "situation" for an actual course of the voting, taking the voting procedure as given, whatever it might be."

"So that would of course determine the outcome—which candidate
was elected, which alternative was decided on."

"But I think it’s normal now to take the
preference scales of the, let me say voters, as defined over a given set of, say, candidates
or possible outcomes."

"We didn’t take that as given."

"What we took as given were the situations,
the courses of the voting, and with the preference scales defined over those."

"The
point of this was to allow for someone who says ‘I’d prefer that such and such a candidate
would be elected, but I wouldn’t want him to be elected with a very narrow margin; rather
than that, I would prefer it to be someone else’."

"It allows for that possibility if you take
the preference scales as defined over the situations in our sense."

"Then we could define a
possible outcome as an equivalence class of situations under the relation that every voter
is indifferent between the two."

"Anyway, as for the theorem, we assumed weak preference
scales, allowing voters to be indifferent between situations."

"And the theorem was, if for
every three possible outcomes there was one which no voter thought worse than the other
two, then the whole lot had a Condorcet winner (which we called a top)."

"Now, I didn’t
think of that theorem."

"Robin Farquharson came to me with it as a "conjecture" 6 and said
“Can you prove this?” and I worked away for some days and came up with a proof and
that’s contained in the little ‘Demonstration’ at the end of the paper.

"And as for that
conjecture7, well I don’t remember which of us proposed it first, but we agreed on it, and
I say I stupidly thought it was far too difficult to prove."

QUESTION (M. Salles):

Although you have been interested in the practical aspects of voting, in your
first book on voting, Voting Procedures, you devote numerous pages to the more theoretical
aspects of social choice including Arrow’s theorem and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.

Dummett:

"Well, as for Arrow’s theorem, everyone says—certainly it’s historically
true, and I think it’s probably theoretically true—that it’s the basis of the whole
subject."

"You have to know that. I hadn’t meant to state a slightly different theorem
from that which Arrow proved; I included it because I agreed that it is fundamental."

"As
for the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, I thought it was essential to convince people of
that."

"There have been advocates of specific electoral systems, in particular STV (Single
Transferable Vote), who have claimed that this system makes it impossible for anyone to
gain any advantage by strategic voting."

"I thought it was absolutely essential to prove that
there can’t be any such system, before discussing any particular system, because, if people
think that it is possible to have a voting system that always denies advantage to strategic
voting, they will have a wrong approach to the whole question."

"So that’s why I put that in."

QUESTION (M. Salles):

I have two questions on Borda.

Could you present for us first Borda’s rule,
the classical Borda rule, and second, your quota Borda system?

M. Dummett:

"Well, the first one."

"Look, I have a pretty strong belief (qualified in
a way that I’ll explain in a moment) that if you could compute the Borda score of the
candidates, as based on each individual’s true preferences, his real preferences, that would
--

[6‘conjecture’ refers here to the existence of a Condorcet winner for majority games.
7‘that conjecture’ is what is now known as Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem.
---

yield you an estimate of which candidate or which possible course of action was maximally
acceptable for the whole body of voters, much more so than the Condorcet winner.

The Borda score is of course computed by assigning, for each individual, 0 points for the
candidate he least favours, 1 point for the candidate last but one on his preference scale,
and so on upwards, and summing the scores each candidate thus obtains.

I don’t have
any belief in majorities, as such, for pretty obvious reasons.

Well, one way of justifying
the Borda count is to say that the distance on an individual’s preference scale between
two alternatives, A and B, is a rough measure of the strength of the preferences; the way
of estimating, as it were, cardinal preference from ordinal preference.

As for its use as a
practical method, especially if you’re just trying to select one course of action or elect one
candidate, I’m not at all sure of its merits.

Because quite apart from agenda manipulation,
there is a temptation for people to vote tactically by putting the preferred candidate at
the top and then the rest in inverse order of likelihood of being elected.

Now, if a few
people did that it would not disturb very much.

If a lot of people did that, it would
produce a result that bears no relation to actual preferences, because the better they are
at guessing which are the candidates likely to be elected, the more it would disturb them.

By putting those likely to be elected at the bottom of their lists, and those not at all
likely to be elected high up, they’re actually converting the popular candidates into unpopular
candidates.

So I simply do not know, and I don’t know how we could actually
find out, how much people could be tempted to vote tactically if the Borda count were
used as a practical method. But, as a method of estimating from the true preferences of
the voters which candidate is the most generally acceptable, I think it ranks very highly.
Now one reason that it may not be perfect in that respect is exemplified precisely by this
business of agenda manipulation (for instance by inserting a candidate who everyone will
think slightly worse than the one you favour). In such a case—I mean, described as I’ve
just described it—quite obviously, the preference for the one who’s slightly better over
the one whom everyone ranks just below him is very slight, compared with most of the
preferences the voters have.

That was what the paper I wrote was about.

There has to be
a method of estimating from the whole—all the preference scales of the voters as between
the alternatives—which preferences are slight and which are strong, so that we don’t just
count each one as of equal weight. The trouble is (well, that paper I wrote showed that)
it makes it extremely complicated to compute the result. That’s a fatal disadvantage of
using such a method in practice: it is essential to a voting system that the count should
be simple to carry out and for the voters to understand. I haven’t thought about it since,
I’m afraid. Some very simple method, or comparatively simple method, of computing the
scores might be able to improve the way in which the Borda count reflects the strength of
preferences. That’s all I have to say about that.

M. Salles: And the quota system?

M. Dummett: It seems to me that the great advantage of STV is what it does for minorities;
it guarantees that the minorities get represented. Otherwise it has no advantages
at all. It’s an almost chaotic system in the sense that a very small change in preferences
would have results that change completely the outcome because it would affect the order
in which candidates got eliminated, and so which votes were distributed at each stage. So
I think that it really is a very bad system, but it has this particular advantage, and I think
the principle of trying to get what is maximally generally acceptable is overridden by the
necessity that minorities should be represented. If a minority that considers itself to have
special needs (that is, things that matter particularly to it, but not to the general electorate),
the worst thing for such a minority is the feeling that it has no voice; that there’s
no one to speak for it. I mean the representation of minorities that you get under STV
is not very great, it just means that in some multi-member constituencies large enough
minorities get a representative. Of course in the country as a whole, they won’t get a large
number of representatives. The Quota Borda system was intended to superimpose on the
Borda count this principle of identifying minorities by the way they voted. That is, they
identify themselves when they all vote for the same two or three candidates in perhaps
different orders, but they put them all at the top. That identifies the minority, and if it’s
a sufficiently large minority (amounting to a quota, say the quota with STV), then it’s
bound to get represented. Under the Quota Borda system, the rule is that it gets represented.
Out of say three candidates, who may all be voted for in different orders, you pick
the one who has the highest Borda count. You don’t just leave it to the minority to pick
their representative; their representative is the one who is maximally acceptable to the
electorate as a whole. But, he may be one who would never get elected on a simple Borda
system. The intention was to superimpose that idea for the representation of minorities
on the Borda system.

M. Salles: What made you decide to write your second book on voting, Principles of
Electoral Reform?

M. Dummett:

"I’ve got a very simple answer to that."

"As I said, my idea in the first
book was to build this bridge."

"I decided that I had completely failed to do that."

"I said
in the "Introduction", quite truly, that I had assumed no mathematics except addition and
multiplication."

"But I realised that what I had asked people to do was to think in a mathematical
way, and they’re simply not prepared to do that."

"I decided that was the reason
why I had failed to build a bridge, so I wrote this, as you say, more popular book in
order to build a sort of bridge without ever actually proving any theorems, or giving any
arithmetical examples, or anything of that kind, but just as a way of getting over some
elementary principles."

QUESTION (R. Fara):

Can I follow up on that a little bit? You speak about your social justice
concerns (a very broad area) and how important it is for minorities to be given a voice.
There’s some intuition that we all share—and why we are so in favour of democratic systems
versus oligarchic or dictatorial systems—that people should be represented, and we
have the idea that the vote is the way for individuals somehow to be represented; and
for people who represent us to act within our authority. So having your vote and having
your say is fundamentally important. And whenever you do give your representatives
authority to speak on your behalf, for example in the EU, United Nations, or wherever,
it is important that your vote as a citizen of your country is no less equal than that of a
citizen of any other country. Only a voting system that somehow captures that is going to
ensure that I, as an individual voter, am going to be appropriately represented. So it is a
fundamental necessity to try to get the voting system right. But we’ve failed all across the
board, nationally and internationally, to do this. Is it just the case, that because voting
theory is so technical and so mathematical and so outside of the domain of understanding
of our ruler types, that it’s not to be taken into consideration? I don’t think that there’s a
conspiracy to keep voting theorists away, but on the other hand I don’t think either that
it’s simply a failure to hear that voting theorists are knocking at the door. So to start
with, what are your thoughts about confronting these people, be it the politicians and
journalists, or first of all I suppose, the interested lay person? How do we become a voice
in a conversation with the interested lay person?

M. Dummett:

"I’m not sure I know the answer to that."

"I wish I did."

"I mean, the
first thing is to convince people that devising an equitable voting system needs a lot of
thought."

"They mostly don’t think that."

"They think it’s an easy thing."

"How you convince
people of that I really don’t know."

"Do you?"

"I mean I realise that you’re supposed to be
interviewing me..."

QUESTION (R. Fara):

Well, I have some ideas, but first, I suppose, is to get the intuition across of
the difference between the concept of voting weight versus the concept of voting power, that the voter or the representative of the voter possesses.

This is usually counter-intuitive
because the numerical weight doesn’t actually tell you what power the person has or hasn’t
to influence the outcome of any decision. Now we can get across to people what the difference
is at an intuitive level. The trouble is, that it becomes so complex so quickly
that it requires technicians and computer power in order to make any sense of it all, and
politicians are reluctant to hand over influence to technicians. Perhaps you might agree
that the younger you introduce persons to the problem—perhaps not school children, but
somewhere along the line—you’ll get people at an early age to say ‘yes, this is a problem
I’d like to contribute to’. Only a tiny minority might go off that way, but at least everyone
will be confronted with it and be aware of it.

M. Dummett:

"Okay. That means convincing people who teach political theory, politics,
political science, whatever you call it, that they ought to pay attention, maybe learn,
so they can introduce their students to the question."

"University students you were speaking
of?"

QUESTION (R. Fara):

Yes, I think school in the UK would be difficult.

Perhaps in Europe and the
United States where you have civics courses it could probably be introduced quite early
on without any technicality. At least the intuition could be got across that voting systems
are designed to make institutional governance work in a representative and democratic
fashion, but that there are all kinds of voting systems, and these have to be designed
with an idea of what it is that you want. These are the kind of ideas that could be got
across at the early stages. And then when you know things like Borda and Condorcet, an
introduction to the formality of the system may come later. Probably it would have to
be seriously discussed at a university course level, but where do you go? To the political
science department?

M. Dummett:

"Well, you have to convince those people, those who teach in the political
science departments, that’s right."

"As for the Borda and Condorcet principles, those
ideas could be introduced at school."

"They’re very easy things to understand."

"But, as for
attachment to the idea of majorities—I mean, I think it’s very common to hear people say
‘Well, we have to do what the majority wants, that’s democracy isn’t it?’—to disabuse
people of that idea."

"Then we need to influence them away from votes with just two possible
outcomes—(that’s where the belief in the majority comes from, from such votes where you
can’t do anything but follow the majority)."

"We had this ridiculous thing, I don’t know if
you know."

"In the House of Commons they were discussing what form the House of Lords
should take, once we had abolished the right of hereditary peers."

"How should the members
of the House of Lords be appointed?"

"There were, I think, five different suggestions."

"Each
was voted on separately, "Yes" or "No", instead of having them arranged in order of preference."

"The result, of course, was that they all failed!"

"I think we need to encourage people to
think more in favour of votes where there are a number of different possibilities and you
have to arrange them in order of preference."

"Then the questions arise, how do you decide?"

"How do we begin to get people thinking seriously about these problems?"

QUESTION (R. Fara): In your inaugural address of the Voting Power and Procedures program at LSE entitled Bridging the Gap, you said that there’s still a crying need for something to be done. When you spoke about the sort of persons who were in charge of adjudicating on the
forms of voting, you suggested the difficulty was that social choice or voting theory experts
have to drop any kind of technical jargon and terminology to become a voice in the conversation.
So I think the sort of tactic that you were suggesting was probably the right one.

M. Salles: I wanted to ask whether there might have been a tension between your
work as a philosopher and your involvement in social justice; that is, a tension between the fact that you are not a moral philosopher, but you are a moral practitioner.

M. Dummett:

"I’ve always thought that intellectuals, if they see a possibility—which
usually there isn’t—of making a practical difference, they have the duty to try to do so."

"I was lucky, I was very lucky."

"Both my wife and I thought that I had ruined my career by
involving myself in the struggle against racism, and therefore for some time not producing any work of my own, but just doing my teaching."

"I did think I’d thrown away my career,
but luckily it didn’t work out that way."

QUESTION (R. Fara):

Yes, your interests in social justice certainly didn’t work out that way.

I know
that most of my philosopher colleagues all think that Professor Sir Michael Dummett was
knighted in 1999 because of his philosophical prowess but, correct me if I’m wrong, you were knighted for your work on racism."

M. Dummett:

"Well, for BOTH actually."

"It was for contributions to philosophy and to
racial justice."

QUESTION (R. Fara):

So there wasn’t a tension as far as your ultimate accolade; they saw no tension
in it?

M. Dummett:

"No, they didn’t."

"I was very glad to have THAT citation: for services to philosophy and racial justice."

QUESTION:

R. Fara:

You answered one of the questions which I wanted to ask which was, I wondered
whether you believed that philosophers should, or perhaps stronger, whether they
had a duty or an obligation or responsibility in some way to take an active part in practical
life and make a difference where they can.

I mean in the sense perhaps that Wittgenstein,
whose influence you might have been under in your earlier days. . .

M. Dummett:

"Yes, I do believe that."

R. Fara: . . .would have probably taken a bit of the other stance and suggested that
you certainly don’t need philosophers dabbling in what people ought to be doing!

M. Dummett:

"I suppose he would."

R. Fara: But you turned against that. And among the great and influential philosophers—
of which you are certainly one—I mean, the tradition brought by Russell and
Chomsky, and currently Peter Singer and so on, is to be involved.

But you are in the
minority it must be said, particularly of analytical philosophers in this country.

M. Dummett:

"Yes, that’s true."

"Yes."

"I’ve never tried to persuade anyone to take a
different attitude."

"But you’re right that very few think that there’s any call on them to be
involved in any practical sense, and partly it’s a tradition in this country, I must say, and
not only amongst philosophers."

"Well, I was very impressed recently, a few years back."

"I
and various Italian philosophers, and other British ones as I recall it, we all published articles
in an Italian daily newspaper on philosophy."

"Now, that’s unthinkable in this country,
absolutely unthinkable!"

"It’s thinkable in France."

"But the idea that philosophers should
write articles for newspapers!"

"I mean, these weren’t articles on politics they were articles
on philosophy."

"In France, and to a lesser extent in Italy, intellectuals generally and
philosophers in particular are expected to make remarks on political and social questions."

"In this country, not."

"I remember very many years ago going with my wife to an exhibition
in Paris of Picasso paintings, and I can’t remember where it was held."

"As we came
down the stairs on the wall facing us was a big plaque headed ‘Intellectuels morts pour la
France.’"

"I mean we just laughed at the thought of ‘Intellectuals who died for England,’ or
something like that!"

"So I think the whole atmosphere as a country (England) is against
people like philosophers becoming involved."

"Russell was a very special case."

"When I was
involved, none of those who were involved with me, thought of me as a philosopher, or even
as an intellectual, but just as one of a number given to this work."

"It’s a whole attitude
that we have here."

QUESTION (R. Fara):

Maybe it’s got something to do with the analytic tradition as it’s practised
particularly in the Anglophone world as compared with the continental tradition in which
man, and his place in society, and so on, is very much grist for the philosophers’ mill. I
want to go just a little bit into your work on racism and immigration. You wrote a book
in 2001 on immigration and refugees, and it’s pretty fair to say probably that immigration
and asylum have moved to the centre stage in world political discussion now. The standard
model that tends to be discussed is that we have rich countries and we have poor
countries (or poor countries that are persecuting, rogue states). Out of the poor countries
we have an economic migration, or out of the persecuting states we have asylum seekers,
refugees, and that’s the model. The rich states are trying to protect their populations
against this horde. Now you wrote your book and it is essentially in two parts, Principles
and History.8 In Part 1, Principles, you give a fairly uncompromising rights-based story
to govern the individual’s inviolable right to move to seek a better and decent life on the
one hand, and it’s on the recipient’s country whose door you are knocking on to give an
argument for why they should refuse you entry.

M. Dummett:

"Right, I think that is a fair brief summary of my ideas."

R. Fara: In the second, the historical part, you say that roughly since the second world
war what we have underpinning all of this in trying to keep the movement of peoples down,
is a racism throughout Europe and the UK. So could you flesh this out, and the book, and
your sentiments about it?

M. Dummett:

"Well, let me just say about the historical part, I think there was built up
in this country an official encouragement of racism."

"The racist groups we had here (extreme
racists), their demand was always for control on immigration, and that has always been
the response of the government—to turn the screw tighter and tighter."

"By doing that,
they very much encouraged the racist feeling that there was in the country because people
obviously saw that tightening control against immigration—and immigration was always
thought of as

COLOURED immigration, white immigrants from America and Australia weren’t
really counted—anyway, they saw that as a declaration.

"‘We don’t want those people here!’"

"And that of course foments the racism of those who think, ‘We don’t want them here, they should all go.’"

"Now, there came a point when it was virtually impossible to turn the
screw any tighter, and people were beginning to see through political parties’ claims to be able to do, or promises to do, that."

"And I think the politicians deliberately switched
this hostility against people of certain races, to hostility towards asylum seekers, and they
started doing lots of propaganda about asylum seekers."

"I mean, our present government
recently rejoiced in the reduction in the number of claims for asylum."

"And how did
they achieve this reduction?"

"Not by diminishing the persecution from which the refugees
were fleeing."

"No."

"By preventing them from even ever getting here to make such claims!"

"And that is now the popular demand, to reduce the number of asylum seekers admitted."

"That is just a transformation of the popular demand, to reduce coloured immigration, or reduce immigration which was understood to be coloured immigration."

"So I think that the
politicians have just switched this hostility which they helped to generate against people
from the Caribbean, from the Indian sub-continent, and so on."

"They just switched it to
asylum seekers."

"That’s a very good way of becoming popular."

"Hitler knew that."

"You
8Dummett (2001)

identify some group as the enemy, and then you promise to do everything to keep the
enemy out and you get votes that way."

"So, that’s about the historical thing you wanted
me to talk about."

"I identify two grounds which a state might reasonably have for keeping people out,
for not accepting people who wanted to immigrate."

"One is very dangerous to talk about
because it’s part of the rhetoric of those who are against refugees, who say ‘we’re being
swamped!’"

"Mrs Thatcher said it about immigrants from India and the Caribbean, ‘We’re
being really rather swamped’ she said on a national Tory broadcast."

Well, I avoided using the word ‘swamped’, I used ‘submerged’, it’s something that does happen, not often but in particular cases."

"Tibet is a good example."

"There is a case when a country with a particular culture is threatened by having a lot of people who don’t share that culture coming in."

"Fiji is a very obvious example where that happened, when under the British
Empire Indians were encouraged to come to Fiji in large numbers."

"I think at one point
they were a greater number than the indigenous population."

"So, that’s one legitimate
ground for restricting immigration."

"I want to emphasize that that’s a rare situation, but
I think it is a situation that does justify restricting the number of people who can enter."

"The other is over-population."

"I mean, you could say that many countries at the moment
are overpopulated, but this should be judged according to the population density in the
region of the world, say Western Europe or South East Asia or wherever."

"I think there
can be a case for restricting entry of people if it’s going to lead to serious over-population
in comparison with other countries in the region."

"Again I don’t think that applies to any
Western European country at the moment, but I think that is a legitimate ground for
restricting entry."

"I think a state has to have a ground for restriction."

"You’re restricting
people’s freedom to move where they want, and there has to be a reason for restricting
anyone’s freedom."

"The question is never ‘why should we allow someone to do that?’ The
question is always ‘is there a reason to stop people from doing that?’"

"That has to be the
question."

"So, I also think under that picture you gave, what you call the usual model, I
mean I actually think that advanced countries would probably mostly benefit from having
a great deal more immigration than they have."

"That’s a factual matter."

R. Fara: . . .Yes, I think that’s right. I think it’s shown that the immigration numbers
are tiny. There are 2 to 5 percent (5 percent being the highest in any European country, 2
percent is probably one of the lowest) and what they contribute to the economy in terms
of taxes vastly outweighs any sort of ‘handouts’ that they’re meant to be receiving. So I
think the facts speak for that.

M. Dummett:

"And what they contribute to their home countries too just by sending
money back!"

R. Fara: Yes, I’ll come to that in a moment in fact, because that’s how Rawls thinks
the way things can go—I mean, he reaches opposite conclusions to you. You’re aware of the
book, The Law of Peoples.9 That was his Amnesty Lectures at Oxford in 1993, devoted to
the subject (you were perhaps aware of this even when you were writing your own piece).
He comes to an opposite conclusion here where he says that rich countries don’t have any
responsibility for the rights of poor countries, to allow them entry or whatever. Somehow
he seems to ground this on the idea that they’ve not tended to the economic base that
they’ve inherited, and in fact that they’re better off to stay where they are and emulate
the more prosperous countries in the process. I know which of the philosophies I would be
in favour of when comparing yours and what Rawls offers. Perhaps you’d like to comment.

M. Dummett:

"Well, Rawls simply thinks almost exclusively of single societies in effect
defined by the nation states we’ve had, and I don’t think one should think on that

9Rawls (1999).
AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL DUMMETT 13

---

basis. I think each one of us has duties to anyone in the world whether a fellow citizen
or a citizen of some other country."

"I mean, if it comes to it and you can do something
about it."

"Duties of states derive from duties of the citizens, and citizens have duties not
only to their fellow countrymen but to anyone else in the world whose condition of life
they can affect."

"So I think arguing in the way that you’ve just described is simply fallacious."

R. Fara: Yes, I think I would agree. Your position, your contrary position to Rawls
was such that his grounds are unfounded.

M. Dummett:

"I think so. It’s not quite, but it’s very nearly the view that a state has
duties only to its own citizens, which is a view that I attacked very strongly in that book."

R. Fara: Yes, yes, exactly, that’s what I thought. A number of reviewers who picked
up the book—2001 it was published—suggested that at heart what was doing the work in
your high ethical principle in the first part of the book, was your Catholicism and a Kantian
approach. Interestingly the Kantian approach was always regarded as what was doing
the work behind Rawls in Theory of Justice, but we won’t go down that route. I wanted to
talk to you a little bit about your Catholicism. As you know, I’ve interviewed Quine and
Davidson at great length (you in fact were part of the project with Davidson) and Strawson
too, and these are some of the most influential philosophers of the second part of the
twentieth century along with yourself, and were your contemporaries and your colleagues
in many instances too). They all proclaimed an atheism, not simply mentioned that they
were and that was it, but actually proclaimed it. That seems to me to be a thread that
runs through the analytical philosophy community; it seems almost to be regarded as a
pre-requisite. If one had any sort of moral leaning, this was some kind of humanism; some
secular activity was the ground for it, and atheism was pretty much the required card to
carry. You were brought up in the Anglican tradition at school, certainly at Winchester.
By your own proclamation, by the age of thirteen, you had become an atheist. At the age
of nineteen you joined the Roman Catholic Church where you’ve remained as a member
ever since. I just wanted to hear from you this rather refreshingly different presentation
of your religion.

M. Dummett:

"Well, I mean, there wasn’t a tension between my work against racism
and philosophy, they’re both very much connected in my own feeling with my religion."

"I
think that it’s a duty to help the poor and oppressed if you can, and that springs very
much from, or I mean is a consequence of, a Christian view of the world."

"But you’re not
asking me about that so much as generally."

"In philosophy, I think the duty of someone
who has a religious belief as I have is to seek the truth. I mean, I know that people say
that people with a religious belief adopt philosophical ideas because they think they know
the answer already and it gives them grounds."

"As far as I’m concerned, I’ve never done
any work in philosophy with a view to supporting my religious beliefs."

"I think the duty
of the philosopher is simply to follow where the argument leads, if it appears to lead in
a direction against his beliefs, he just has to leave it there and say ‘there must be an
answer to this’ or ‘I must have gone wrong somewhere, I don’t know where’."

"I agree that,
particularly in America, it’s not just atheism, it’s straightforward materialism that has
become almost axiomatic among analytic philosophers."

"That used not to be the case here."

"I remember years ago there was a series of Wolfson lectures (lectures sponsored by Wolfson
College); there were six."

"Quine and Davidson were among the lecturers, so there are two
atheists for you."

"As it happened, all the other four were Catholics."

"There were myself,
Peter Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe and Dagfinn Føllesdal."

"I’s not generally known that
he’s a Catholic, but he is."

"So we had four Catholics and two atheists."

"It used not to
be the case here that religious belief was so rare among philosophers—there are still one
or two like myself—but I don’t know whether that’s the increasing influence of American
philosophy or just chance. I do think that in philosophy . . . well I believe in metaphysics (I haven’t done much work in metaphysics, and I think a great deal of metaphysics is
basically the philosophy of physics), that metaphysics is concerned with clarifying our
conception of the universe in which we live.

Whereas a lot of other philosophy is concerned
with clarifying theories about ourselves, about intention, about emotion and so on.

So
I think that philosophy needs to be pursued by . . .

I mean if you declare yourself as
an atheist or a materialist, you’re just as much giving the conclusion in advance, in fact
rather more than if you declare your adherence to a religious faith.

QUESTION
(R. Fara):

It seems somehow that the mind-body distinction in philosophy of mind and
consciousness studies has been a sort of bogeyman.

The reduction programme to single
state materialism would leave no room for the spiritual sphere, that’s on one side. There’s
also another tension, the explosion of Marxism, again for different reasons, sending one
off on the atheistic path. I wondered if you agree that neither of those two things really
touches the concepts of metaphysics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of mathematics,
logic and the technicalities of the subject.

M. Dummett:

"Well, I agree, they are irrelevant."

"I think all this concentration on the
notion of consciousness is because it seems the last obstacle to oppose to a materialist
reduction of reality, I think that’s a kind of inheritance from Cartesian dualism."

"Questions
like: ‘What is consciousness for? What is the point of there being such a thing as
consciousness?"

"I think those are ridiculous questions."

"I think they are questions which
come from a kind of dualism in the first instance."

"They want everything."

"They want to
arrive at monism, but they can’t quite get there.

R. Fara: And finally, we want to talk a little bit about a passion, or a pleasure—your
interest in tarot cards.

M. Dummett:

"Right, well my interest in the first place was in the games—it more than
any other kind of card game—the history of the cards is a tool to the history of the games."

"Well, you want to ask me why I’m interested. I don’t think anyone should be interested
in the subject who doesn’t enjoy playing cards, because this is an enormous family of very
interesting and often very intricate games. I’ll give two examples."

"In Bologna they play a
game with the local form of the Tarot pack. It’s for four fixed partners as in Bridge, and
the greater part of the scores at the end of the hand comes from the multitude of different
combinations of cards that you and your partner have in the tricks that they’ve won. So
it’s not like Bridge where you’re just concentrating on making so many tricks. Two-thirds
of the cards in the pack can contribute to these combinations, and so you’re trying to win
such combinations, and prevent your opponents from getting them. So almost every single
card matters. All right, that’s one fascinating form of the game."

"In Bologna they play
with sixty-two cards."

"In Hungary they play with only forty-two. You have twenty-two
fixed trumps and only five cards per plain suit. Through very strict rules governing the
bidding, you can often tell a great deal about what cards people have in their hands. And
the thing is, you get a certain score. You have partners, but the partners are not fixed,
they’re determined by the declarer. The successful declarer calls a card, which he doesn’t
have in his hand, and the player who has that card becomes his partner, but he doesn’t
say so. And so until that card is played, you don’t know for sure who is whose partner.
Besides the score you get for winning the game, there are also scores for all sorts of feats
you can get in play like winning the last trick with the smallest trump, winning the two
top trumps and the bottom trump and so on. The most valuable is winning the second
highest trump with the highest trump. Now sometimes it’s worth not winning the game
in order to make one of these feats. You’ll score more that way. So again, when you start,
it’s not certain what the objective of the declarer and his unknown partner is going to
be. Well that’s another example of a really fascinating game. I got interested in all this
in a very odd way.

"We were on holiday in France."

"We bought a tarot pack."

There were
rules of the game with the pack. We started playing with our family. We thought it was a
very good game.

When I was back in England, I came across an Austrian pack with rules
and this was an obviously related, but a very different game. So I wrote to various people
asking if they could tell me how the game was played in other countries. I wrote to experts
on card games. None of them could tell me, so I started trying to find out for myself,
and it gradually grew into a serious piece of research. Trying to discover the history .
. . I mean, there are written rules of games from the seventeenth century onwards, but
before that, there are just some literary allusions. So it really becomes a piece of serious
detective work, and that’s part of the fascination. I’ll give you an example of a puzzle.

"I know a lot of people who are collectors of playing cards."

"In the 1930s—this is quite a
short time ago—there was a kind of tarot pack. My collector had the wrapping and it was
written in French, ‘Tarot `a soixante treize cartes’ (or possibly ‘septante trois cartes’). It
was just like an ordinary Austrian pack, so that the suits had eight cards in each suit, but
instead of twenty-one numbered trumps it had forty numbered trumps. Now it’s still a
total mystery, it’s mystery I’d love to solve. In some French-speaking parts of Europe they
played this game. I mean, these packs have not been made since the 1930s. We wrote to
the manufacturer and they had a record of making these packs, but not where they were
sold, so I still don’t know who played it or why. So there are all sorts of problems of this
kind.

"So I enjoy playing."

"I enjoy meeting people who play."

"That’s a very good way to
meet people, and I’ve done a lot of this in Sicily."

"In Sicily, the game only survives in four
scattered towns, in each of which it’s become a local tradition . . .

R. Fara: Which towns can I ask?

M. Dummett:

"Oh, you know Sicily?"

"Calatafimi, Mineo -- do you know Mineo? It’s a small town south-west of Catania --, Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (near Messina) and Tortorici, inland."

In about 1900 you could still play it all over the island.

But now if you ask
anyone in Palermo, no one has heard of it.

Just in these four places.

I mean, they play
differently but the substrate of the basic rules are the same.

And it’s different from any
other tarot game played elsewhere.

So I enjoy that part of it; going and meeting people
who play, and they teach me the game.

So it became a sort of passion.

*********************

The fortune telling
and occult part of it has never been my principal interest, but I wrote a chapter, in the
first book l wrote on tarot, on the occult use of the tarot for fortune-telling, taking it up
to about 1920.
**************

I had to do some work for that. But then I thought, it’s a chapter which
no one interested in that subject will ever see, and no one interested in card games would
take any notice of.

So I thought of extracting it and finding someone to bring it up to date,
and publish the result as a book.

Then Donald Laycock, an Australian anthropologist,
sent me an article that he’d written on modern occultist tarot packs.

So I wrote to him
suggesting he should collaborate with me and bring the history down to the present, and
he agreed.

But while I was in California I received a pathetic letter from him saying,

“I
have contracted a form of leukaemia and can no longer work”.

Very soon after writing it
he died.

I obtained a new collaborator, Ronald Decker, and we enlisted a third, French,
collaborator, Thierry Depaulis. It was going to be a single book bringing the history down
to the present, but it turned into two, because it got too long.

So I went on with the
second volume in collaboration with Ronald Decker, who did the largest part of the work;
and even then we only reached 1970.

----

R. Fara: So the two books were, the first was A Wicked Pack Of Cards and the second
was called?

M. Dummett:

"A History of the Occult Tarot 1870-1970."

"1970 was when there was a
great explosion."

"Before that people were content to choose just one occultist tarot pack
out of the few that existed. Now all these different occultist packs were being produced: witches’ tarot and feminist tarot, native American tarot, Basque tarot, Japanese tarot—
tarots from every culture that had never had anything to do with it, and people started
collecting occultist tarots.

R. Fara: And you’ve just completed a third book.

M. Dummett:

"Ah, that is about the game of tarot!—or rather the many games."

"The
largest part of it consists of detailed rules of the different games, as played now or in the
past."

"This is essentially bringing up to date my The Game of Tarot of 1980; so much has
been discovered, not only by me, since then. So this new book is just called A History of
Games Played with the Tarot Pack; it’s in two volumes, because it’s an enormous family
of games.

It is historical as well as covering games played at the present day.

M. Salles: Is it published?

M. Dummett:

"It was published, yes."

"I’m sorry I haven’t got a copy of it here."

"Anyway,
only real enthusiasts would buy that book!"

R. Fara: I must say it’s extremely refreshing to hear that the former Wykeham Professor
of Logic and one of the foremost practitioners in philosophy of mathematics and
logic has actually been co-authoring with Ronald Decker, who is, I think, curator of the
playing-card museum at the American Playing Card Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s
an absolutely fascinating part of your life.
M
. Salles: Do you still play tarot?

M. Dummett:

"Well, the trouble is, we used to have a little club in Oxford which I
founded years ago."

"Now it’s disintegrated."

"I mean some of them left Oxford, some of them
died, so I don’t have that anymore."

"All I have is a computer programme for playing French
tarot."

"Well, it’s not so much fun as playing with real people, of course."

"But I sometimes
beat those three little men in the computer!"

References

Dummett M (1978) Truth and Other Enigmas. Duckworth, London
Dummett M (1981) Frege: philosophy of language (second edition). Duckworth, London
Dummett M (1981a) The interpretation of Frege’s philosophy. Duckworth, London
Dummett M (1984) Voting procedures. Clarendon Press, Oxford
Dummett M (1991) Frege and other philosophers. Clarendon Press, Oxford
Dummett M (1991a) Frege: philosophy of mathematics. Duckworth, London
Dummett M (1991b) The logical basis of metaphysics. Duckworth, London
Dummett M (1993) Origins of analytical philosophy. Duckworth, London
Dummett M (1993a) The seas of language. Clarendon Press, Oxford
Dummett M (1997) Principles of electoral reform. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Dummett M (1998) The Borda count and agenda manipulation. Soc Choice Welfare 15:289-
296
Dummett M (2000) Elements of intuitionism (second edition). Clarendon Press, Oxford
Dummett M (2001) On immigration and refugees. Routledge, London
Dummett M (2004) Truth and the past. Columbia University Press, New York
Dummett M (2005) The justificationist’s response to a realist. Mind 114: 671-688
Dummett M (2005a) The work and life of Robin Farquharson. Soc Choice Welfare 25
Dummett M, Farquharson R (1961) Stability in voting. Econometrica 29: 289-296
Gibbard A (1973) Manipulation of voting schemes: a general result. Econometrica 41: 587-601
Peacocke C (2005) Justification, realism and the past. Mind 114: 639-670
Rawls J (1999) The law of peoples. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass)
Salles M (2006) Michael Dummett on social choice and voting. In: Auxier RE (ed) Library of
living philosophers: the philosophy of Michael Dummett. Open Court, Chicago and La Salle
Satterthwaite MA (1975) Strategy-proofness and Arrow’s conditions: existence and correspondence
theorems for voting procedures and social choice functions. J Econ Theory 10: 187-217
Sen AK (1986) Social choice theory. In: Arrow KJ, Intriligator MD Handbook of mathematical
economics Volume III: 1073-1181
cpnss, london school of economics, houghton street, london wc2 2ab, united kingdom
E-mail address: R.Fara@lse.ac.uk
crem, umr-cnrs 6211 and Institut SCW, mrsh, universit´e de caen, 14032 caen cedex, france
and cpnss, london school of economics, houghton street, london wc2 2ab, united kingdom
E-mail address: maurice.salles@unicaen.fr

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