How Green Was My Grice

---- Elsewhere, I am discussing, with R. B. Jones, Grice's dictum about


(i) Everything green is extended

vis a vis his _other_ dictum, elsewhere,


(ii) Nothing can be red and green all over.



---- It's odd that in America, Grice was mainly known for a few decades as "that bit of a co-author who cared to reply to Quine". For Quine had allegedly revolutionised the Americans with his "Two dogmas of empiricism" and Grice, with Strawson, had perhaps chosen the wrong title for his defense: "In defense of a dogma". Little did they know that if an American detests something, it is a dog(ma). In Oxford we live by them!

----

In that infamous defence they go on to discuss

(i) (x) Gx --> Ex

i.e. anything green is extended, as a meaning postulate. Grice and Strawson argue that Quine's dismissal of (i) as analytically true is premature. "We don't know if (i) is _true_, never mind analytically so", they argue.

Their defense rests on the idea that 'green' and 'extended' are fuzzy terms, and that to know all of their usages, is lexicologically inapt.


---- Their case rests on the litmus test question:

"Should we count a _point_ of green light as _extended_ or not?"

I'm afraid I would not, but then, like Grosseteste, I never _saw_ a 'point of green light'!

--- Oddly, Grice is more cautious and generous when approaching Tim's and Karen's playmates. He is testing a 9-year-old's ability to check if this or that is 'synthetic a priori' -- for surely if Kant is right, a child kant be wrong.

-----

Back in _that_ day, he would test the children with (ii), "Nothing can be red and green all over" with the caveat

(iii) No spots or stripes allowed!


--- But surely while a spot is wide enough to _be_ green, I'm less sure about a _point_ of green, never mind light!

--- Etc.