Grice on seeing stars

Grice is so lost in philosophy that no one can stop him if he wished to. 

He was puffing away, and, without pausing, he went on to the next question on his "Logic paper." 

"My favourite in the Logic paper, however, was the answer to another question.

'Could there be nothing between two stars?' 

All these Schools questions look very simple till you start thinking about them. 

What Grice said about this one was implicatural.

'There are two senses in which there can be nothing between two stars' — which is always a good way of going at such questions. 

On the one hand, IF there is strictly not anything between two things, they are together, and if two stars are adjacent, clearly, they are not exactly *two* stars.

They are perhaps a twin star. 

On the other hand — and this was Grice's second point — if I were to say to you, 'There's absolutely nothing between Oxford and Birmingham,' meaning thereby that there are not *any restaurants on the road*, in this sense there is not anything between two stars. 

A distinction thus emerges between 'nothing' and 'a nothing,' because when you answer the question, 'What is there between two stars?' by saying 'There isn't anything between them,' you tend to think there is 'a' nothing -- a great lump of nothing -- and there it is, holding the stars apart. 

This, actually, when you think about it, is nonsense.

Because you can't have 'a nothing,' which naturally leads Grice to discuss the difference between 'space' and 'a space.'

If you can't say that there's 'nothing' between two stars, neither can you give much account of what there is between them. 

You tend to say there's 'a' great expanse of Space, with a capital 'S.'

This is not very satisfactory, because the way one uses 'space' is to say there is 'a space' between my table and my door.

That means you can measure it, and presumably there is a distance between table and door that can be measured. 

Whereas if you say there is a great lump of Space, that's like saying a great lump of nothing or of time, which, of course, is misleading. 

Grice's conclusion is that in a 'loose' sense, in which there is nothing between Oxford and Birmingham, viz. restaurants on the road, there may be nothing between two stars; to wit, nothing you could give a name to, or nothing you thought it worth giving a name to, or nothing of the sort that I expect shall interest you. 

But in a strict, explicit, sense there cannot be nothing between two stars.

Because if there were nothing between two stars, the stars would just be on top of each other. 

This is Greats people actually do.