Grice Morphed to an Intensional Isomorphist

Sorry for the ugliness in header, but hey. This is serious.

Grice has twelve betes noires in his "Prejudices and predilections of Paul Grice, which become his life and opinions".

These are:

1 extensionalism
2 empiricism
3 functionalism
4 materialism
5 mechanism
6 naturalism
7 nominalism
8 phenomenalism
9 physicalism
10 positivism
11 reductionism
12 scepticism

--- He provides some clues as to how to approach them _in toto_ -- his 'twelvefold antipathy' rather than 'twelve discrete different antipathies': they should all be termed criminals by the philosopher's commision of trade. But he is being perhaps too much of a liberal.

He says he wants to examine just one bete noire for the time being. He selects the first, in strict order of appearance.

Since we are currently examining this vis a vis Carnap, we speak of 'Grice morphed onto an intensional isomorphist'. The early Grice was not. He would say that the utterer who utters,

p --> q

is the same utterer who utters

-p v q

These are intensionally nonisomorphic (perhaps -- but this label is best applied to predicate calculus). What U means, however, is the same. As a defender of truth-functionalism, the early Grice is an extensional isomorphist.

The later Grice finds this a protectionist measure for the commodity of an explanation that does use 'intensional isomorphism':

Grice then says he'll select "Extensionalism", which he defines as

"a position imbued with the
spirit of Nominalism [another bete noire]
and dear both to those who feel that (b) is no more
informative an answer to the question (a)
than would be (d) as an answer to
(c)."

Scenario I:


a: Why is a pillar box called 'red'?
b: Because it is red.


Scenario II:


c: And why is that person called 'Paul Grice'?

d: Because he is Paul Grice.


Cfr. Geary's daughter:

Geary: Why are pigs dirty?
Daughter: Because they are pigs.

---

The picture of Extensionalism Grice presents is clear enough. It is

"a world of PARTICULARS
as a domain
stocked with tiny pellets ...
distinguish[ed] by the clubs to which they
belong".

He had a thing for clubs. He would define Austin's club as "the club for those whose members have no class" (or rather 'for those whose classes have no members')

And cfr. The Grice Club, extensionally and intensionally defined. Cfr. Jones, "Carnap Corner", next blog.

Grice goes on:

"The potential consequences of the possession
of in fact UNEXEMPLIFIED features [or properties]
would be ... the same."

Grice then turns to a pet topic of his, "Vacuity". He had dedicated his contribution to the anti-dogmatist of them all, Quine, with an essay on "Vacuous Names and Descriptions" published 1969 in Hintikka/Davidson (we need a reprint of that, urgently!). And he knew what he was talking about. We have discussed this with Roger Bishop Jones elsewhere ('Vacuity' in Hist-Anal)

Vis a vis his critique of Extensionalism (and where is Grice's diagogism when one wants it?) one may want to

"relieve a certain VACUOUS predicate ... by exploiting the
NON-VACUOUSNESS of other predicates which are constituents in the
definition of the original vacuous predicate."

This is good, because his "Vacuous Names" focuses on, well, names, rather than predicates or descriptors. Here his approach is more, shall we say, substantial: connotative, rather than denotative.

Grice exemplifies this with two allegedly vacuous (i.e. non-extensional) predicates:

1

-- " ... is married to a daughter of an English queen and a pope"


2

-- " ... is a climber on hands and knees of a 29,000 foot mountain."


The second has echoes in "Vacuous Names"

That's Marmaduke Bloggs.

Marmaduke Bloggs is indeed a climber on hands and knees of a 29,000 ft. mountain. The Merseyside Geographicall Society was so impressed that they had this cocktail in his honour. But he failed to turn up.

"He is not at the party"

"Who isn't?"

"Marmaduke Bloggs"

"He doesn't exist. He was invented by the journalists".

--- etc. Cfr. Horn on a similar passage by Lewis Carroll on this -- in his Symbolic Logic.

----

Grice is interested in what makes Marmaduke Bloggs an 'elusive chap, if ever there was one':

"By appealing to different

"relations" [now, alla Carnap, Abriss]

to the 'primitive' predicates, one can claim is

such _distinct_ relation,

rather than the empty set beloved of extensionalists
which each vacuous predicate is made equivalent to."

But his objection to this move has to do with what he feels an adhocness in defining the relations as involving again, NON-VACUOUS predicates.

-- the relevant passage is available as google books --. (p. 70).

A SECOND TACK. (He is looking for harder and harder tacks)

A second way out to the alleged problem involves 'trivial' versus
'non-trivial' explanations.

Recall that for Grice all betes noires trade on the untradeability of explanations. They want to restrict the realm of explananda. They regiment our hopes for explanation. (Hume's fork or his is-ought problem would be similar blockages).

Grice has it in clear enough terms:

"the explanatory opportunities for vacuous predicates depend on their embodiment in a system".

His caveat here is purely ontological, or shall we say eschatological:

"I conjecture, but cannot demonstrate,

that the only way to secure such a

system would be to confer

SPECIAL ONTOLOGICAL privilege

upon the ENTITIES of PHYSICAL SCIENCE..."

-- But that's Eddington "non-visible" 'table'. And he had a foot on both camps here, or rather, he knew that, historically, he was and will forever be seen as a proponent of Austinian Code: the idea that there is wisdom in folk: the cathedral of laerning is Science but it's also Common Sense, as expressed in our ordinary ways of talking (ta legomena).

And he seems to be allowing that sometimes we do engage in talk where the entities of things OTHER than physical science are relevant too. Notably stone-age physics. This is possibly a thing of the past now, but most of the English ways of talking (if grammar is going to be 'a pretty good guide to logical form') are embued with it, and they would be just rejected en bloc if only CONTEMPORARY physical science, true physical science, is deemed articulatory only.

Grice notes at this point:

"It looks AS IF states of affairs in the
... scientific world need, for credibility,
support from the vulgar world of ORDINARY OBSERVATION..." --

Eddington's _visible_ 'table' to which he explicitly refers in his little quoted, "Actions and Events" (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1986).

And this, he feels would be an 'embellisment' in need of some justification. In other words, if the real table (of Eddington) is not made of matter, but of wavicles, why is it that a wavicle be deemed as a more fundamental entity than, say, 'table as we knew it'?

Etc.