More on Grice's quirks with quarks

---- by J. L. Speranza
------- for the Grice Club.

As we've seen, in "Actions and Events", Grice lists, rather in a hurried way, things which have been yet passed the test of 'being':

a. 'persons'! (He writes 'people', I think actually).
b. chairs and tables
c. atoms, electrons and quarks

----

The quark is an interesting one to consider, and I have, elsewhere, this club. The quark is the component of the nucleus, -- hence the occurrence in Grice's style just before the atom and the electron.

What Grice is suggesting is that English (as she was spoke by Grice -- I write in jest there --) tends to favour a substance-attribute ontology. This was Strawson's big point, and Grice was ready to allow for changes in the metaphysical 'scheme' to allow for idioms and 'manners of speaking'. But he also sometimes distrusted what he called 'the new technologies' by which he meant anything that was beyond his power of comprehensibility! So we need to see this, charitably, from the standpoint of the physicists themselves, talking 'ontologically'.

When Eddington introduced the 'wavicle' he was aware that there was this strong presupposition in English that things fit a substance-and-attribute ontology: the wavicle is like a wave, and like a particle -- but neither. He is struggling with the lingo, as he finds it. And he is conscious about it. The inventor of the 'quark' (and discoverer of the quark, of course) was perhaps less imaginative ("it's the sound a duck makes") --. But in general, anything belonging to quantum physics is a charm to analyse along Gricean lines of those presuppositions of substance-attribute that incorporate what Russell called "stone-age metaphysics".

Grice reacted against the 'metaphysics'.

"The use made of the Russellian phrase 'stone-age metaphysics'
may have more rhetorical appeal than argumentative force.
Certainly 'stone-age physics, if by that we mean
a primitive set of hypotheses about how the world goes which
might (conceivably) be embedded somehow or other in the
ordinary languge, would NOT be a proper object of first-order
devotion. But this fact would not prevent something
derivable or extractable from stone-age physics, perhaps
some very general characterisation of the
nature of reality, from being a proper target
for serious research; for this extractable
characterisation might be the SAME as that
which is extractable from, or that which underlies,
twentieth-century physics."

----

By which he meant quarks, as he refers to them in "Actions and Events" in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 67, 1984).

He goes on:

"Moreover, a metaphysic embedded in ordinary
language"

--- if we are going to allow Russell to USE 'metaphysic' like that --

"(should there be such a thing) might NOT
have to be derived from any belief about
how the world goes which such language reflects;
it might, for example, be derived somehow
from

------ THE CATEGORIAL STRUCTURE OF
------------ THE LANGUAGE."

--- Note the use of 'the' -- "the language": i.e. English, French, Latin. NOT "language" per se.

Grice goes on:

"Furthermore, the discovery and presentation
of such a metataphysic might turn out to be
a properly scientific enterprise,
though not, of course, an enterprise in
physical science. A rationally
organised and systematised study of reality
might perhaps be such an enterprise;"

--- I can think of Bunge!

"so might some highly general
theory in formal semantics,"

----- Note that he entitled the Part II of his Studies in the Way of Words: "Explorations in Semantics and Metaphysics".

"though it might of course be a serious
question whether these two candidates are
identical"

--- should anyone think they are!

Etc. There are other things to consider. Note that 'wavicle' Eddington uses when he wants to talk, er, ... English. Surely the so-called Cooperative Principle and its attendant maxims -- which spring, Grice thinks, from canons of universal rationality -- do apply, as a matter of fact, when a quantum physicists talks -- on the phone, even? -- with another!

Analytic philosophy of science has, naturally, and in part due to the efforts by Carnap, done much to elucidate the philosophical issues involved in the 'linguistic' interpretation of 'theory-construction'. What Grice may allow to do is to give a pragmatic bent to the 'pragmatist' construal of doctrines like 'instrumentalism', 'operationalism', and such, which have been proposed as candidates to what Grice calls the 'naive diagnostic realism'. He was not against theory-construction per se -- what say would he have on this? --. But he was interested in the linguistic issue in toto -- from a natural, or ordinary, language like English to a calculus or a system which some still characterise as a 'language'.