System GHP

By J. L. Speranza



When Grice was asked (by Davidson/Hintikka) to supply a piece for their festschrift for Quine (eventually published as "Words and Objections", as a sarcastically funny -- that's Davidson and my irony) parody of Quine's "Word and Object", Grice complied with a rather difficult piece which Quine was, naturally, obliged to comment. He wrote,

"Thanks, but no thanks. I find your
solution to my problem by far more
problematic to my life than would
be a proper solution. Plus, it's
forbiddingly, and thus illegally,
complex in ways it should not be"

(or words).

Poor Grice had titled his thing "System Q" and only wanted to impress.

When Myro died of AIDS in 1988, people (especially his students, S. Haslanger included) were devastated. Grice died the following year.

I was fortunate to get copies of Myro's things -- which I must keep somewhere in my Swimming-Pool Library. The ref. I was familiar with was Myro's albeit terse reference to his "System G" (in honour of Grice) (Both gave joint seminars in Metaphysics for grad students at Berkeley).

The unpublished work by Myro -- and also some other stuff which he did publish in his lifetime on "Time", etc. -- provides a good semantics for some aspects of first-order predicate calculus with identity which is what System Q was all about, in the end (or at the end of the night, as I prefer).

I keep referring to this System G, then.

When I was publishing (out of my mind -- I use publish as Wittgenstein did, "I publish my things when I think about them -- provided I leave some relic of it somewhere") I was meaning to have an appendix on System G, which I had sublabelled

System G-HP

which I subtitled: "being a highly powerful version of system G".

(Today the Peanuts cartoon reads Snoopy titling his novel: Why dogs are the most important creatures on earth, sky, and perhaps space", to have his friend criticising it as being "too long" and he thinking of dropping the "maybe"=.

My tutor saw it and said,

"Highly powerful? Hopefully plausible, more likely"

In any case, ... that was the idea. Later,

JLS