by JLS
for the GC
I wrote, in "Process and Conversation"
"Grice thought, or at least said, that Heidegger was "the greatest living philosopher"".
J comments:
"Interesting. Grice approved of Heidegger?".
J: I have to be sincere. This is one of the injokes in the Club. In the "Prolegomena to Logic and Conversation" -- the one that precedes the one you were re-reading recently -- and published in 1989, as chapter I, Grice is considering "assertion", vis a vis a discussion by Searle in "Assertions and aberrations". And so Grice gives the example of an utterance, uttered by Grice,
"Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher"
and goes on to elucidate or analyse what he may have meant by having asserted it. So, in the circumstances, seeing that one of the "felicity" conditions is that U (the utterer) is supposed to be taken seriously, Grice is possibly NOT thinking that Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher.
So. It´s not easy to see if he approved of Heidegger. Not that Heidegger would have cared!
Cheers!
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Obviously, he was referring to the fact that Meinong was already dead. Heidegger picked up where Husserl left off and Husserl was merely translating Meinong from Catholic into Jewish.
ReplyDeleteGood. Plus, we also need to analyse the meaning of 'great'. 'Living', as Craig notes, means that Meinong was dead by then. But 'biggest', or 'greatest'? Let me see if I find the exact wording by Grice:
ReplyDeletep. 18 of WoW:
"There also seems to be some uncertainty about the precise nature of the speech-act which Searle's condition is supposed to govern. This is said to be the act of assertion. Now, in the ordinary SENSE of the word, assertion is quite a specific speech-act. To assert is (approximately) to make a claim. If I say "Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher," I have certainly made an assertion (on the assumption, at least that I can expect you to take me seriously)" He goes on to compare this with, "There is a robin".
"On the assumption, that is, that I can expect you to take me seriously" is a subtle clause. It's the perlocutionary in Grice -- the perlocutionary uptake rendered illocutionary. Why would I have to expect that my Addressee takes me seriously? I suppose there's the case, "There's a wolf coming to the field!". Nobody believes him. The wolf eats the shepherd. But what if I'm a circus impresario. None of my employees (all clowns) take my assertions (e.g. E = mc2) seriously. Can I be my own addressee. In which case, Grice did mean that Heidegger was the greatest living philosopher. Only, he said "if".