The term "Palæolithic" was coined by archaeologist John Lubbock in 1865. It derives from Greek: παλαιός, palaios, "old"; and λίθος, lithos, "stone", literally meaning "old age of the stone" or "Old Stone Age."
It refers to the Grice/Russell polemic: is it stone-age physics or stone-age metaphysics we are dealing with.
This from
Schaffer,
Jonathan, "The Metaphysics of Causation", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/causation-metaphysics/.
may help clarify:
"The
main argument for eliminativism is that science has no need of causation. The
notion of causation is seen as a scientifically retrograde relic of Stone Age
metaphysics. As Russell claims, “In the motions of mutually gravitating bodies,
there is nothing that can be called a cause, and nothing that can be called an
effect; there is merely a formula.” (1992, p. 202, see also Quine 1966) The
differential equations of sophisticated physics are said to leave no room for
causes, or at least to have no need of them."
Grice disagrees.
He spends quite a few paragraphs in his seminal "Actions and Events" (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1986) in discussing 'cause' as per the Greek 'aitia'.
A rebel without a cause
being his favourite idiom.
A rebel without a cause seems like a contradiction in terms. A cause, for the Greek, was a reason for acting. This may correspond to what Russell (who never studied palaeolithic implicatures too seriously) would dismiss as "out-dated" by a few millennia. Or not!
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