A Real Philosopher

by J. L. Speranza

for the Grice Club, etc.



-- Grice was irritated when people referred to

Heidegger

"of all people" -- Grice notes --

as

"a _real_ philosopher".

"I hope they are not suggesting I am a ghost". But they were!


In 'The Meaning of a Word', J L Austin writes

"I can only answer a question
of the form, 'what is the meaning of x?' if x is some
particular word you are asking about.
This supposed general question is REALLY [sic. JLS] just a
spurious question of a type which commonly arises in Philosophy. [I] may
call it The Fallacy of Asking About Nothing-in-Particular, which is a
pracice decried by the plain man [and the plain woman. JLS], but by the
Philosopher called 'generalising' and regarded with some complacency. Many
other examples of the Fallacy can be found: take, for example, the case of
reality - we try to pass from such questions as

'How would you distinguish a REAL rat from an IMAGINARY one?'

to

'What is a REAL THING?',

a question which merely gives rise to nonsense" (p.58).

Obviously, Austin had not heard of Coca Cola's slogan there.

Spurious maybe, but hardly nonsense.

His remarks on 'rat' (vs 'real rat') indeed reminded me, as I say, of Grice's Conversational Implicature, especially Strawson's example of the 'big sewer rat' that was to refute Grice's analysis of meaning.

"Surely a sewer rat cannot 'mean' that the house is infested" (Strawson writes).

It's different if you try and say it with flowers.

Austin notes:

"If I say, 'She bought some nice artificial roses'. We don't mean
(necessarily) she bought 'some nice roses'. An Artificial rose is not a
rose, as Shakespeare would agree.

Austin's scorn on the 'Fallacy of Asking About Nothing in
Particular' may well be over the top. I recall reading from Geach, I think,
that we can know something to the effect that,

'It is a good myrio-metre'

even if we don't know what a 'myrio-metre' is.

A 'good' (real?) myrio-metre would be a myriometre which does its job well.

Similarly, one can arrive at some generalisations about the meaning of the general statement

'x is real' (as opposed to the specific 'This sword is real') which is not
necessarily fallacious. Indeed, as some people do use 'good' or 'real'
swords they seem to be suggesting, perhaps unintentionally, but whatcha gonna do, a kind of general 'functionalist' approach which may be given in general terms (Hence his bringing in the issue of 'real food' into the discussion.


A second passage from Austin also applies to Grice's concern:

"It seems, does it not,
perfectly obvious, that every proposition must have a contradictory. Yet it
does not turn out so. Suppose that I live in harmony and friendship for four
years with a cat, and then it delievers a philippic. We ask ourseves, perhaps,

'Is it a real cat, or is it NOT a real cat?'

'Either it is, or it is not, but we cannot be sure which'. Now actually,
that it not so: neither 'It's a real cat' nor 'It's not a real cat' fits the
facts semantically. Each is designed for other situations than this one: you
could not say the former of something which delivers philoppics, nor yet the
latter of something what has behaved as this has for four years" (p.67).

Perhaps his most specific treatment is the section 'Reality' in his paper on
'Other Minds'.

Here, Austin discusses goldfinches.

"Do you know it's a REAL goldfinch?"

'Are you sure it's REALLY red?' may mean, are you sure it isn't
orange, or again, are you sure it isn't just the peculiar light? If you ask me,

'How do you know it's a REAL stick?

How do you know it's REALLY bent?

Are you sure he's REALLY angry? [cf J Wisdom on 'Other Minds'. JLS]

then you are querying my credentials or my facts (it's often uncertain
which) in a certain special way. In various special, recognised ways,
depending essentially upon the nature of the matter which I have announced
myself to know [eg swords. JLS], either my current experiencing or the item
currently under consideration (or uncertain which) may be ABNORMAL, PHONEY.
Either I myself may be dreaming, or in delirium, or under the influence of
mescal, &c, or else the item may be STUFFED, PAINTED, DUMMY, ARTIFICIAL,
TRICK, FREAK, TOY, ASSUMED, FEIGNED, etc or else again there's an
uncertainty (it's left open) where *I* am to belate or it is - mirages,
mirror images, odd lightining effects, etc. These doubts are all to be
allayed by means of recongised procedures (more or less roughly recongised
of course) appropriate to the particular type of case. The doubt of question

'But is it a real one'

has always (MUST have) a special basis. The wile of the metaphysician
consists in asking

'Is it a real table?'

(a kind of object which has no obvious way of being phoney), and not
specifying or limiting what may be wrong with it, so that I feel at a loss
how to prove it is a real one. It is the use of the word 'real' in this
manner that leads us onto the supposition that 'real' has a single meaning
(the real word, material objects) and that a highly profound and puzzling
one. Instead we should insist always on specifying with what real is being
contrasted - 'not what' I shall have to show it is, in order to show it is
'real': and then usually we shall find SOME SPECIFIC, LESS FATAL WORD,
appropriate to the particular case, to substitute for 'real'. [What we can
say, in general, is]. Some Cs are and some arent', some do and some don't,
and it may be very interesting or important whether they are or arent't,
whether they do or don't, but they're all Cs, real Cs just the same'.
Sometimes, we distingusih not between 'Cs' and 'real Cs', but rather between
Cs and Ds. There is a reason for choosing the one procedure rather than the
other: all cases where we use the 'real' formula exhibit a likeness, as do
all cases where we use 'PROPER', a word which behaves in many ways like
'real', and is NO LESS NOR MORE PROFOUND" (p.87).

In 'Pretending', Austin goes on to consider an item he had discussed with Grice on the Sataurday mornings.

Austin considers the
difference between

"RD: The Reality-dissembled about which the audienece is
to be hoodwinked" and the

"RBD: some real-behaviour dissembled, as for
instance when I'm really engaged in biting the carpet but disguise this fact
by pretending to be kissing it (p.260).

But it's "A plea" on 'real' in Philosophical
Papers which best connects, I think, with Grice's 'Conversational Implicature'.

Here Austin is contrasting the conversational implicature (as it were) of
'real' vs 'intentionally'. "Only when there is some suggestion that it might
have been UNintentional does it make non-misleading sense to say, for
example, 'I ate my dinner intentionally'. To this extent, it is true that
'intentionally' serves to rule out 'unintentionally'. What would be wholly
untrue is to suggest that 'unintentionally' is

THE WORD THAT WEARS THE TROUSERS."

-- Grice will joke on this as being 'artless sexist Austin all over again' (Gr91:4).

"That is," Austin notes, "that until we have grasped certain specific ways of doing
things unintentionally, and except as a way of ruling these out,
'intentionally' has no positive meaning. There are words of this
description, 'real' for example is one. (p.284). For the treatment of this
misguided 'conversational manoeuvre' within the framework of his
Conversational Pragmatics, v. H P Grice, 'Prolegomena to Logic &
Conversation', in Studies in the Way of Words.

I once had to pass a course in aesthetics. I found it pretty boring, since it was all ... well, _vague_. So I proposed to analyse the Gricean implicatures of two British artists:

One is "Gilbert and George" -- they use the singular when they heavy-pet.

(How can they be art and we don't know it?)

The other was Keith Arnatt (whom I knew and whose daughter I had visited in Wales -- Tintern Abbey):

Arnatt wrote:

I am a real artist.


I had the asthetics professor elaborate on this. He failed me with an A+!