Grice's Reaction to the Modernist/Neo-Traditionalist Dispute

--- by JLS
-- for the GC

This is excerpted from WoW, Ways of Words, p. 374. Grice lists four points. Perhaps the clearest is his fourth point:

Basically it amounts to

What the eye no longer sees the heart no longer grieves for.

It would seem that Grice thinks that anything that Strawson detected was _wrong_ with the Modernist apparatus can be 'tweaked' if that's the word, with some syntactic device.

Grice writes:

"EVEN *IF* IT SHOULD PROVE

necessary to SUPPLEMENT the

apparatus of Modernist logic

with additional conventional

devices"

--- rather than 'implicatural' -- he is trading on his point that if something is conversationally implicated it is done so by the very nature of reasoning -- and not because we are following a 'rule', say --.

He goes on:

"such supplementation is in TWO RESPECTS

*undramatic* and innocuous and does NOT

involve a radical re-construction of

the Modernist apparatus".

------

Indeed, a look at Grice's "Vacuous Names" indicates that he found his programme as providing mere subscripts to the Whitehead/Russell corpus -- he relies on Benson Mates, "Elementary Logic" for that essay --.

Grice goes on to make explicit the first reason why this is innocuous and undramatic:

Reason 1:

"It IS innocuous and undramatic

partly because the newly introduced

CONVENTIONAL"

rather than 'conversational', via implicature, and thus free from entailment and cancellable

"can be regarded SIMPLY as

'codification' [scare quotes mine! JLS],

with a consequently enlarged

range of utility, of pre-existing

'informal' [scare quotes mine. JLS]"

--- i.e. conversational, as per conversational implicature.

"methods of generating implicature;"

----

Reason (2)

"[it is innocuous and undramatic] partly

because the new devices"

--- what Myro will call System G

"do NOT introduce any new 'ideas'"

(scare quotes mine! JLS)

"or concepts, but are rather

procedural in character".


As the exportation of the existential commitment:

"There is a king of France, and he is not bald"

to represent the 'codified' method to read the implicature avoiding the truth-value gap in "The king of France is not bald".

-----

Grice goes on:

"This last feature can be seen from the fact

that the conventional devices which I propose

are bracketing or scope devices,"

---- square bracket device in WoW:iii and subscript device in "Vacuous Names" --

"and to understand them is simply to know

how sentencnes in which they INITIALLY

appear"

--- for some reason -- i.e. to codify a pre-existing informal method to generate an implicature -- with emphasis on 'informal'.

Grice goes on:

"can be re-structured and re-written

as sentences couched in ORTHODOX modernist

terms from which the new devices have been

eliminated. What the eye no longer sees the

heart no longer grieves for."