IMPLICATVRA -- in 18 volumes, vol. XVIII

valitum: Oddly Vitters has a couple of lectures on ‘value,’ that Grice ‘ignored.’ Valitum should be contrasted from‘validum.’ ‘Valid,’ which is cognate with ‘value,’ a noun Grice loved, is used by logicians. In Grice’s generalised alethic-cum-deontic logic, ‘valid’ applies, too. ‘Valid’ is contrasted to the ‘satisfactoriness’ value that attaches directly to the utterance. ‘Valid’ applies to the reasoning, i.e. the sequence of psychological states from the premise to the conclusion. How common and insidious was the talk of a realm of ‘values’ at Oxford in the early 1930s to have Barnes attack it, and Grice defend it? ‘The realm of values’ sounds like an ordinary man’s expression, and surely Oxford never had a Wilson Chair of Metaphysical Axiology.  validum is the correct form out of Roman ‘valeor.’ Grice finds the need for the English equivalent, and plays with constructing the ‘concept’ “to be of value”! There’s also the axiologicum. The root for ‘value’ as ‘axis’ is found in Grice’s favourite book of the Republic, the First! Grice sometimes enjoys sounding pretentious and uses the definite article ‘the’ indiscriminately, just to tease Flew, his tutee, who said that talking of ‘the self’ is just ‘rubbish’. It is different with Grice’s ‘the good’ (to agathon), ‘the rational,’ (to logikon), ‘the valuable’ (valitum), and ‘the axiological’. Of course, whilesticking with ‘value,’ Grice plays with Grecian “τιμή.” Lewis and Short have ‘vălor,’ f. ‘valeo,’ which they render as ‘value,’ adding that it is supposed to translate in Gloss. Lab, Grecian ‘τιμή.’ ‘valor, τιμή, Gloss. Lab.’ ‘Valere,’ which of course algo gives English ‘valid,’ that Grice overuses, is said by Lewis and Short to be cognate with “vis,” “robur,” “fortissimus,” cf. debilis” and they render as “to be strong.” So one has to be careful here. “Axiology” is a German thing, and not used at Clifton or Oxford, where they stick with ‘virtus’ or ‘arete.’ This or that Graeco-Roman philosopher may have explored a generic approach to ‘value.’ Grice somewhat dismisses Hare who in Language of Morals very clearly distinguishes between deontic ‘ought’ and teleological, value-judgemental ‘good.’ For ‘good’ may have an aesthetic use: ‘that painting is good,’ the food is good). The sexist ‘virtus’ of the Romans perhaps did a disservice to Grecian ‘arete,’ but Grice hardly uses ‘arete,’ himself. It is etymologically unrelated to ‘agathon,’ yet rumour has it that ‘arete,’ qua ‘excellence,’ is ‘aristos,’ the superlative of ‘agathon.’ Since Aristotle is into the ‘mesotes,’ Grice worries not. Liddell and Scott have “ἀρετή” and render it simpliciter as “goodness, excellence, of any kind,” adding that “in Hom. esp. of manly qualities”: “ποδῶν ἀρετὴν ἀναφαίνων;” “ἀμείνων παντοίας ἀρετὰς ἠμὲν πόδας ἠδὲ μάχεσθαι καὶ νόον;” so of the gods, “τῶν περ καὶ μείζων ἀ. τιμή τε βίη τε;” also of women, “ἀ. εἵνεκα for valour,” “ἀ. ἀπεδείκνυντο,” “displayed brave deeds.”  But when Liddell and Scott give the philosophical references (Plathegel and Ariskant), they do render “ἀρετή,” as ‘value,’ generally, excellence, “ἡ ἀ. τελείωσίς τις” Arist. Met. 1021b20, cf. EN1106a15, etc.; of persons, “ἄνδρα πὺξ ἀρετὰν εὑρόντα,” “τὸ φρονεῖν ἀ. μεγίστη,” “forms of excellence, “μυρίαι ἀνδρῶν ἀ.;” “δικαστοῦ αὕτη ἀ.;” esp. moral virtue, opp. “κακία,” good nature, kindness, etc. We should not be so concerned about this, were not for the fact that Grice explored Foot, not just on meta-ethics as a ‘suppositional’ imperratives, but  on ‘virtue’ and ‘vice,’ by Foot, who had edited a reader in meta-ethics for the series of Grice’s friend, Warnock. Grice knows that when he hears the phrases value system, or belief system, he is conversing with a relativist. So he plays jocular here. If a value is not a concept, a value system at least is not what Davidson calls a conceptual scheme. However, in “The conception of value” (henceforth, “Conception”) Grice does argue that value IS a concept, and thus part of the conceptual scheme by Quine. Hilary Putnam congratulates Grice on this in “Fact and value,” crediting Baker – i. e. Judy – into the bargain. While utilitarianism, as exemplified by Bentham, denies that a moral intuition need be taken literally, Bentham assumes the axiological conceptual scheme of hedonistic eudaemonism, with eudaemonia as the maximal value (summum bonum) understood as hedone. The idea of a system of values (cf. system of ends) is meant to unify the goals of the agent in terms of the pursuit of eudæmonia. Grice wants to disgress from naturalism, and the distinction between a description and anything else. Consider the use of ‘rational’ as applied to ‘value.’ A naturalist holds that ‘rational’ can be legitimately apply to the ‘doxastic’ realm, not to the ‘buletic’ realm. A desire (or a ‘value’) a naturalist would say is not something of which ‘rational’ is predicable. Suppose, Grice says, I meet a philosopher who is in the habit of pushing pins into other philosophers. Grice asks the philosopher why he does this. The philosopher says that it gives him pleasure. Grice asks him whether it is the fact that he causes pain that gives him pleasure. The philosopher replies that he does not mind whether he causes pain. What gives him pleasure is the physical sensation of driving a pin into a philosopher’s body. Grice asks him whether he is aware that his actions cause pain. The philosopher says that he is. Grice asks him whether he would not feel pain if others did this to him. The philosopher agrees that he would. I ask him whether he would allow this to happen. He says that he guesses he would seek to prevent it. Grice asks him whether he does not think that others must feel pain when he drives pins into them, and whether he should not do to others what he would try to prevent them from doing to him. The philosopher says that pins driven into him cause him pain and he wishes to prevent this. Pins driven by him into others do not cause him pain, but pleasure, and he therefore wishes to do it. Grice asks him whether the fact that he causes pain to other philosophers does not seem to him to be relevant to the issue of whether it is rationally undesirable to drive pins into people. He says that he does not see what possible difference can pain caused to others, or the absence of it, make to the desirability of deriving pleasure in the way that he does. Grice asks him what it is that gives him pleasure in this particular activity. The philosopher replies that he likes driving pins into a philosopher’s resilient body. Grice asks whether he would derive equal pleasure from driving pins into a tennis ball. The philosopher says that he would derive equal pleasure, that into what he drives his pins, a philosopher or a tennis ball, makes no difference to him – the pleasure is similar, and he is quite prepared to have a tennis ball substituted, but what possible difference can it make whether his pins perforate living men or tennis balls? At this point, Grice begins to suspect that the philosopher is evil. Grice does not feel like agreeing with a naturalist, who reasons that the pin-pushing philosopher is a philosopher with a very different scale of moral values from Grice, that a value not being susceptible to argument, Grice may disagree but not reason with the pin-pushing philosopher. Grice rather sees the pin-pushing philosopher beyond the reach of communication from the world occupied by him. Communication is as unattainable as it is with a philosopher who that he is a doorknob, as in the story by Hoffman. A value enters into the essence of what constitutes a person. The pursuit of a rational end is part of the essence of a person. Grice does not claim any originality for his position (which much to Ariskant), only validity. The implicaturum by Grice is that rationalism and axiology are incompatible, and he wants to cancel that. So the keyword here is rationalistic axiology, in the neo-Kantian continental vein, with a vengeance. Grice arrives at value (validitum, optimum, deeming) via Peirce on meaning. And then there is the truth “value,” a German loan-translation (as value judgment, Werturteil). The sorry story of deontic logic, Grice says, faces Jørgensens dilemma. The dilemma by Jørgensens is best seen as a trilemma, Grice says; viz. Reasoning requires that premise and conclusion have what Boole, Peirce, and Frege call a “truth” value. An imperative dos not have a “truth” value. There may be a reasoning with an imperative as premise or conclusion. A philosopher can reject the first horn and provide an inference mechanism on elements – the input of the premise and the output of the conclusion -- which are not presupposed to have a “truth” value. A philosopher can reject the second horn and restrict ‘satisfactory’ value to a doxastic embedding a buletic (“He judges he wills…”). A philosopher can reject the third horn, and refuse to explore the desideratum. Grice generalizes over value as the mode-neutral ‘satisfactory.’ Both ‘p’ and “!p” may be satisfactory. ‘.p’ has doxastic value (0/1); ‘!p’ has buletic value  (0/1). The mode marker of the utterance guides the addresse you as to how to read ‘satisfactory.’ Grice’s ‘satisfactory’ is a variation on a theme by Hofstadter and McKinsey, who elaborate a syntax for the imperative mode, using satisfaction. They refer to what they call the ‘satisfaction-function’ of a fiat. A fiat is ‘satisfied’ (as The door is closed may also be said to be satisfied iff the door is closed) iff what is commanded is the case. The fiat ‘Let the door be closed’ is satisfied if the door is closed. An unary or dyadic operator becomes a satisfaction-functor. As Grice puts it, an inferential rule, which flat rationality is the capacity to apply, is not arbitrary. The inferential rule picks out a transition of acceptance in which transmission of ‘satisfactory’ is guaranteed or expected. As Grice notes, since mode marker indicate the species ‘satisfactory’ does. He imports into the object-language ‘It is satisfactory-d/p that’ just in case psi-d/b-p is satisfactory. Alla Tarski, Grice introduces ‘It is acceptable that’: It is acceptable that psi-d/b-p is satisfactory-b/d just in case ‘psi-d/b-p is satisfactory-d/b’ is satisfactory-b/d. Grice goes on to provide a generic value-assignment for satisfactoriness-functors. For coordinators: “φ Λ ψ” is 1-b/d just in case φ is 1-b/d and ψ is 1-b/d. “φ ν ψ”  is 1-b/d just in case one of the pair, φ and ψ, is 1-b/d. For subordinator: “φ⊃ψ” is 1-b/d just in case either φ is 0-b/d or ψ is 0-b/d. There are, however, a number of points to be made. It is not fully clear to Grice just how strong the motivation is for assigning a value to a mode-neutral, generic functor. Also he is assuming symmetry, leaving room for a functor is introduced if a restriction is imposed. Consider a bi-modal utterance. “The beast is filthy and do not touch it” and “The beast is filthy and I shall not touch it” seem all right. The commutated “Do not touch the beast and it is filthy” is dubious. “Touch the beast and it will bite you,” while idiomatic is hardly an imperative, since ‘and’ is hardly a conjunction. “Smith is taking a bath or leave the bath-room door open” is intelligible. The commutated “Leave the bath-room door open or Smith is taking a bath” is less so. In a bi-modal utterance, Grice makes a case for the buletic to be dominant over the doxastic. The crunch comes, however, with one of the four possible unary satisfactoriness-functors, especially with regard to the equivalence of  “~psi-b/d-p” and “psi-b/d-~p). Consider “Let it be that I now put my hand on my head” or  “Let it be that my bicycle faces north” in which neither seems to be either satisfactory or unsatisfactory. And it is a trick to assign a satisfactory value to “~psi-b/d-p” and “~psi-b/d~p.” Do we proscribe this or that form altogether, for every cases? But that would seem to be a pity, since ~!~p seems to be quite promising as a representation for you may (permissive) do alpha that satisfies p; i.e., the utterer explicitly conveys his refusal to prohibit his addressee A doing alpha. Do we disallow embedding of (or iterating) this or that form? But that (again if we use ~!p and ~!~p  to represent may) seems too restrictive. Again, if !p is neither buletically satisfactory nor buletically unsatisfactory (U could care less) do we assign a value other than 1 or 0 to !p (desideratively neuter, 0.5). Or do we say, echoing Quine, that we have a buletically satisfactoriness value gap? These and other such problems would require careful consideration. Yet Grice cannot see that those problems would prove insoluble, any more than this or that analogous problem connected with Strawsons presupposition (Dont arrest the intruder!) are insoluble. In Strawsons case, the difficulty is not so much to find a solution as to select the best solution from those which present themselves. Grice takes up the topic of a calculus in connection with the introduction rule and the elimination rule of a modal such as must. We might hope to find, for each member of a certain family of modalities, an introduction rule and an elimination rule which would be analogous to the rules available for classical logical constants. Suggestions are not hard to come by. Let us suppose that we are seeking to provide such a pair of rules for the particular modality of necessity □. For (□,+) Grice considers the following (Grice thinks equivalent) forms: if φ is demonstrable, □φ is demonstrable. Provided φ is dependent on no assumptions, derive φ from □φ. For  (□,-), Grice considers From □φ derive φ. It is to be understood, of course, that the values of the syntactical variable φ would contain either a buletic or a doxastic mode markers. Both !p and .p would be proper substitutes for φ but p would not. Grice wonders: [W]hat should be said of Takeuti’s conjecture (roughly) that the nature of the introduction rule determines the character of the elimination rule? There seems to be no particular problem about allowing an introduction rule which tells us that, if it is established in P’s personalised system that φ, it is necessary, with respect to P, that φ is doxastically satisfactory/establishable. The accompanying elimination rule is, however, slightly less promising. If we suppose such a rule to tell us that, if one is committed to the idea that it is necessary, with respect to P, that φ, one is also committed to whatever is expressed by φ, we shall be in trouble. For such a rule is not acceptable. φ will be a buletic expression such as Let it be that Smith eats his hat. And my commitment to the idea that Smiths system requires him to eat his hat does not ipso facto involve me in accepting volitively Let Smith eat his hat. But if we take the elimination rule rather as telling us that, if it is necessary, with respect to X, that let X eat his hat, then let X eat his hat possesses satisfactoriness-with-respect-to-X, the situation is easier. For this person-relativised version of the rule seems inoffensive, even for Takeuti, we hope.  Grice, following Mackie, uses absolutism, as opposed to relativism, which denies the rational basis to attitude ascriptions (but cf. Hare on Subjectsivism). Grice is concerned with the absence of a thorough discussion of value by English philosophers, other than Hare (and he is only responding to Mackie!). Continental philosophers, by comparison, have a special discipline, axiology, for it! Similarly, a continental-oriented tradition Grice finds in The New World in philosophers of a pragmatist bent, such as Carus. Grice wants to say that rationality is a value, because it is a faculty that a creature (human) displays to adapt and survive to his changing environments. The implicaturum of the title is that values have been considered in the English philosophical tradition, almost alla Nietzsche, to belong to the realm irrational. Grice grants that axiological implicaturum rests on a PRE-rational propension. While Grice could play with “the good” in the New World, as a Lit. Hum. he knew he had to be slightly more serious. The good is one of the values, but what is valuing? Would the New Worlders understand valuing unattached to the pragmatism that defines them? Grice starts by invoking Hume on his bright side: the concept of value, versus the conception of value. Or rather, how the concept of value derives from the conception of value. A distinction that would even please Aquinas (conceptum/conceptio), and the Humeian routine. Some background for his third Carus lecture. He tries to find out what Mackie means when he says that a value is ultimately Subjectsive. What about inter-Subjectsive, and constructively objective? Grice constructs absolute value out of relative value. But once a rational pirot P (henceforth, P – Grice liked how it sounded like Locke’s parrot) constructs value, the P assigns absolute status to rationality qua value. The P cannot then choose not to be rational at the risk of ceasing to exist (qua person, or essentially rationally human agent). A human, as opposed to a person, assigns relative value to his rationality. A human is accidentally rational. A person is necessarily so. A distinction seldom made by Aristotle and some of his dumbest followers obsessed with the modal-free adage, Homo rationale animal. Short and Lewis have “hūmānus” (old form: hemona humana et hemonem hominem dicebant, Paul. ex Fest. p. 100 Müll.; cf. homo I.init.), adj., f. “homo,” and which they render as “of or belonging to man, human.” Grice also considers the etymology of ‘person.’ Lewis and Short have ‘persōna,’  according to Gabius Bassus ap. Gell. 5, 7, 1 sq., f. ‘persŏno,’ “to sound through, with the second syllable lengthened.’ Falsa est (finitio), si dicas, Equus est animal rationale: nam est equus animal, sed irrationale, Quint.7,3,24:homo est animal rationale; “nec si mutis finis voluptas, rationalibus quoque: quin immo ex contrario, quia mutis, ideo non rationalibus;” “a rationali ad rationale;” “τὸ λογικόν ζῷον,” ChrysiStoic.3.95; ἀρεταὶ λ., = διανοητικαί, oἠθικαί, Arist. EN1108b9; “λογικός, ή, όν, (λόγος), ζῶον λόγον ἔχον NE, 1098a3-5. λόγον δὲ μόνον ἄνθρωπος ἔχει τῶν ζῴων, man alone of all animals possesses speech, from the Politics. Grice takes the stratification of values by Hartmann much more seriously than Barnes. Grice plays with rational motivation. He means it seriously. The motivation is the psychological bite, but since it is qualified by rational, it corresponds to the higher more powerful bit of the soul, the rational soul. There are, for Grice, the Grecians, Kantotle and Plathegel, three souls: the vegetal, the animal, and the rational. As a matter of history, Grice reaches value (in its guises of optimum and deeming) via his analysis of meaning by Peirce. Many notions are value-paradeigmatic. The most important of all philosophical notions that of rationality, presupposes objective value as one of its motivations. For Grice, ratio can be understood cognoscendi but also essendi, indeed volendi and fiendi, too. Rational motivation involves a ratio cognoscendi and a ratio volendi; objective, “objectum,” and “objectus,” ūs, m. f. “obicio,” rendered as “a casting before, a putting against, in the way, or opposite, an opposing; or, neutr., a lying before or opposite (mostly poet. and in postAug. prose): dare objectum parmaï, the opposing of the shield” “vestis;” “insula portum efficit objectu laterum,” “by the opposition,” “cum terga flumine, latera objectu paludis tegerentur;” “molis;” “regiones, quæ Tauri montis objectu separantur;” “solem interventu lunæ occultari, lunamque terræ objectu, the interposition,” “eademque terra objectu suo umbram noctemque efficiat;” “al. objecta soli: hi molium objectus (i. e. moles objectas) scandere, the projection,” transf., that which presents itself to the sight, an object, appearance, sight, spectacle;” al. objecto;  and if not categoric. This is analogous to the overuse by Grice of psychoLOGICAL when he just means souly. It is perhaps his use of psychological for souly that leads to take any souly concept as a theoretical concept within a folksy psychoLOGICAL theory. Grice considered the stratification of values, alla Hartmann, unlike Barnes, who dismissed him in five minutes. “Some like Philippa Foot, but Hare is MY man,” Grice would say. “Virtue” ethics was becoming all the fashion, especially around Somerville. Hare was getting irritated by the worse offender, his Anglo-Welsh tutee, originally with a degree from the other place, Williams. Enough for Grice to want to lecture on value, and using Carus as an excuse! Mackie was what Oxonians called a colonial, and a clever one! In fact, Grice quotes from Hares contribution to a volume on Mackie. Hares and Mackies backgrounds could not be more different. Like Grice, Hare was a Lit. Hum., and like Grice, Hare loves the Grundlegung. But unlike Grice and Barnes, Hare would have nothing to say about Stevenson. Philosophers in the play group of Grice never took the critique by Ayer of emotivism seriously. Stevenson is the thing. V. Urmson on the emotive theory of ethics, tracing it to English philosphers like Ogden, Barnes, and Duncan-Jones. Barnes was opposing both Prichard (who was the Whites professor of moral philosophy – and more of an interest than Moore is, seeing that Prichard is Barness tutor at Corpus) and Hartmann. Ryle would have nothing to do with Hartmann, but these were the days before Ryle took over Oxford, and forbade any reference to a continental philosopher, even worse if a “Hun.” Grice reaches the notion of value through that of meaning. If Peirce is simplistic, Grice is not. But his ultra-sophisticated analysis ends up being deemed to hold in this or that utterer. And deeming is valuing, as is optimum. While Grice rarely used axiology, he should! A set of three lectures, which are individually identified below. I love Carus! Grice was undecided as to what his Carus lectures were be on. Grice explores meaning under its value optimality guise in Meaning revisited. Grice thinks that a value-paradeigmatic notion allows him to respond in a more apt way to what some critics were raising as a possible vicious circle in his approach to semantic and psychological notions. The Carus lectures are then dedicated to the construction, alla Hume, of a value-paradeigmatic notion in general, and value itself. Grice starts by quoting Austin, Hare, and Mackie, of Oxford. The lectures are intended to a general audience, provided it is a philosophical general audience. Most of the second lecture is a subtle exploration by Grice of the categorical imperative of Kant, with which he had struggled in the last Locke lecture in “Aspects,” notably the reduction of the categorical imperative to this or that counsel of prudence with an implicated protasis to the effect that the agent is aiming at eudæmonia. The Carus Lectures are three: on objectivity and value, on relative and absolute value, and on metaphysics and value. The first lecture, on objectivity and value, is a review Inventing right and wrong by Mackie, quoting Hare’s antipathy for a value being ‘objective’. The second lecture, on relative and absolute value, is an exploration on the categorical imperative, and its connection with a prior hypothetical or suppositional imperative. The third lecture, on metaphycis and value, is an eschatological defence of absolute value. The collective citation should be identified by each lecture separately. This is a metaphysical defence by Grice of absolute value. The topic fascinates Grice, and he invents a few routines to cope with it. Humeian projection rationally reconstructs the intuitive concept being of value. Category shift allows to put a value such as the disinterestedness by Smith in grammatical subject position, thus avoiding to answer that the disinterestedness of Smith is in the next room, since it is not the spatio-temporal continuan prote ousia that Smith is. But the most important routine is that of trans-substantatio, or metousiosis. A human reconstructs as a rational personal being, and alla Kantotle, whatever he judges is therefore of absolute value. The issue involves for Grice the introduction of a telos qua aition, causa finalis (final cause), role, or métier. The final cause of a tiger is to tigerise, the final cause of a reasoner is to reason, the final cause of a person is to personise. And this entails absolute value, now metaphysically defended. The justification involves the ideas of end-setting, unweighed rationality, autonomy, and freedom. In something like a shopping list that Grice provides for issues on free. Attention to freedom calls for formidably difficult undertakings including the search for a justification for the adoption or abandonment of an ultimate end. The point is to secure that freedom does not dissolve into compulsion or chance. Grice proposes four items for this shopping list. A first point is that full action calls for strong freedom. Here one has to be careful that since Grice abides by what he calls the Modified Occams Razor in the third James lecture on Some remarks about logic and conversation, he would not like to think of this two (strong freedom and weak freedom) as being different senses of free. Again, his calls for is best understood as presupposes. It may connect with, say, Kanes full-blown examples of decisions in practical settings that call for or presuppose libertarianism. A second point is that the buletic-doxastic justification of action has to accomodate for the fact that we need freedom which is strong. Strong or serious autonomy or freedom ensures that this or that action is represented as directed to this or that end E which are is not merely the agents, but which is also freely or autonomously adopted or pursued by the agent. Grice discusses the case of the gym instructor commanding, Raise your left arm! The serious point then involves this free adoption or free pursuit. Note Grices use of this or that personal-identity pronoun: not merely mine, i.e. not merely the agents, but in privileged-access position. This connects with what Aristotle says of action as being up to me, and Kant’s idea of the transcendental ego. An end is the agents in that the agent adopts it with liberum arbitrium. This or that ground-level desire may be circumstantial. A weak autonomy or freedom satisfactorily accounts for this or that action as directed to an end which is mine. However, a strong autonomy or freedom, and a strong autonomy or freedom only, accounts for this or that action as directed to an end which is mine, but, unlike, say, some ground-level circumstantial desire which may have sprung out of some circumstantial adaptability to a given scenario, is, first, autonomously or freely adopted by the agent, and, second, autonomously or freely pursued by the agent. The use of the disjunctive particle or in the above is of some interest. An agent may autonomously or freely adopt an end, yet not care to pursue it autonomously or freely, even in this strong connotation that autonomous or free sometimes has. A further point relates to causal indeterminacy. Any attempt to remedy this situation by resorting to causal indeterminacy or chance will only infuriate the scientist without aiding the philosopher. This remark by Grice has to be understood casually. For, as it can be shown, this or that scientist may well have resorted to precisely that introduction and in any case have not self-infuriated. The professional tag that is connoted by philosopher should also be seen as best implicated than entailed. A scientist who does resort to the introduction of causal indeterminacy may be eo ipso be putting forward a serious consideration regarding ethics or meta-ethics. In other words, a cursory examination of the views of a scientist like Eddington, beloved by Grice, or this or that moral philosopher like Kane should be born in mind when considering this third point by Grice. The reference by Grice to chance, random, and causal indeterminacy, should best be understood vis-à-vis Aristotles emphasis on tykhe, fatum, to the effect that this or that event may just happen just by accident, which may well open a can of worms for the naive Griceian, but surely not the sophisticated one (cf. his remarks on accidentally, in Prolegomena). A further item in Grices shopping list involves the idea of autonomous or free as a value, or optimum. The specific character of what Grice has as  strong autonomy or freedom may well turn out to consist, Grice hopes, in the idea of this or that action as the outcome of a certain kind of strong valuation  ‒ where this would include the rational selection, as per e.g. rational-decision theory, of this or that ultimate end. What Grice elsewhere calls out-weighed or extrinsically weighed rationality, where rational includes the buletic, of the end and not the means to it. This or that full human action calls for the presence of this or that reason, which require that this or that full human action for which this or that reason accounts should be the outcome of a strong rational valuation. Like a more constructivist approach, this line suggests that this or that action may require, besides strong autonomy or freedom, now also strong valuation. Grice sets to consider how to adapt the buletic-doxastic soul progression to reach these goals. In the case of this or that ultimate end E, justification should be thought of as lying, directly, at least, in this or that outcome, not on the actual phenomenal fulfilment of this or that end, but rather of the, perhaps noumenal, presence qua end. Grice relates to Kants views on the benevolentia or goodwill and malevolentia, or evil will, or illwill. Considers Smiths action of giving Jones a job. Smith may be deemed to have given Jones a job, whether or not Jones actually gets the job. It is Smiths benevolentia, or goodwill, not his beneficentia, that matters. Hence in Short and Lewis, we have “bĕnĕfĭcentĭa,” f. “beneficus,” like “magnificentia” f. magnificus, and “munificentia” f. munificus; Cicero, Off. 1, 7, 20, and which they thus render as “the quality of beneficus, kindness, beneficence, an honorable and kind treatment of others” (omaleficentia, Lact. Ira Dei, 1, 1; several times in the philos. writings of Cicero. Elsewhere rare: quid praestantius bonitate et beneficentiā?” “beneficentia, quam eandem vel benignitatem vel liberalitatem appellari licet,” “comitas ac beneficentia,” “uti beneficentiā adversus supplices,”“beneficentia augebat ornabatque subjectsos.” In a more general fashion then, it is the mere presence of an end qua end of a given action that provides the justification of the end, and not its phenomenal satisfaction or fulfilment. Furthermore, the agents having such and such an end, E1, or such and such a combination of ends, E1 and E2, would be justified by showing that the agents having this end exhibits some desirable feature, such as this or that combo being harmonious. For how can one combine ones desire to smoke with ones desire to lead a healthy life? Harmony is one of the six requirements by Grice for an application of happy to the life of Smith. The buletic-doxastic souly ascription is back in business at a higher level. The suggestion would involve an appeal, in the justification of this or that end, to this or that higher-order end which would be realised by having this or that lower, or first-order end of a certain sort. Such valuation of this or that lower-order end lies within reach of a buletic-doxastic souly ascription. Grice has an important caveat at this point. This or that higher-order end involved in the defense would itself stand in need of justification, and the regress might well turn out to be vicious. One is reminded of Watson’s requirement for a thing like freedom or personal identity to overcome this or that alleged counterexample to freewill provided by H. Frankfurt. It is after the laying of a shopping list, as it were, and considerations such as those above that Grice concludes his reflection with a defense of a noumenon, complete with the inner conflict that it brings. Attention to the idea of autonomous and free leads the philosopher to the need to resolve if not dissolve the most important unsolved problem of philosophy, viz. how an agent can be, at the same time, a member of both the phenomenal world and the noumenal world, or, to settle the internal conflict between one part of our rational nature, the doxastic, even scientific, part which seems to call for the universal reign of a deterministic law and the other buletic part which insists that not merely moral responsibility but every variety of rational belief demands exemption from just such a reign. In this lecture, Grice explores freedom and value from a privileged-access incorrigible perspective rather than the creature construction genitorial justification. Axiology – v. axiological.  Valitum -- Fact-value distinction, the apparently fundamental difference between how things are and how they should be. That people obey the law or act honestly or desire money is one thing; that they should is quite another. The first is a matter of fact, the second a matter of value. Hume is usually credited with drawing the distinction when he noticed that one cannot uncontroversially infer an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ the isought gap. From the fact, say, that an action would maximize overall happiness, we cannot legitimately infer that it ought to be done  without the introduction of some so far suppressed evaluative premise. We could secure the inference by assuming that one ought always to do what maximizes overall happiness. But that assumption is evidently evaluative. And any other premise that might link the non-evaluative premises to an evaluative conclusion would look equally evaluative. No matter how detailed and extensive the non-evaluative premises, it seems no evaluative conclusion follows directly and as a matter of logic. Some have replied that at least a few non-evaluative claims do entail evaluative ones. To take one popular example, from the fact that some promise was made, we might it appears legitimately infer that it ought to be kept, other things equal  and this without the introduction of an evaluative premise. Yet many argue that the inference fails, or that the premise is actually evaluative, or that the conclusion is not. Hume himself was both bold and brief about the gap’s significance, claiming simply that paying attention to it “wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason” Treatise of Human Nature. Others have been more expansive. Moore, for instance, in effect relied upon the gap to establish via the open question argument that any attempt to define evaluative terms using non-evaluative ones would commit the naturalistic fallacy. Moore’s main target was the suggestion that ‘good’ means “pleasant” and the fallacy, in this context, is supposed to be misidentifying an evaluative property, being good, with a natural property, being pleasant. Assuming that evaluative terms have meaning, Moore held that some could be defined using others he thought, e.g., that ‘right’ could be defined as “productive of the greatest possible good” and that the rest, though meaningful, must be indefinable terms denoting simple, non-natural, properties. Accepting Moore’s use of the open question argument but rejecting both his non-naturalism and his assumption that evaluative terms must have descriptive meaning, emotivists and prescriptivists e.g. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, and Hare argued that evaluative terms have a role in language other than to denote properties. According to them, the primary role of evaluative language is not to describe, but to prescribe. The logical gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, they argue, establishes both the difference between fact and value and the difference between describing how things are and recommending how they might be. Some naturalists, though, acknowledge the gap and yet maintain that the evaluative claims nonetheless do refer to natural properties. In the process they deny the ontological force of the open question argument and 302 F   302 treat evaluative claims as describing a special class of facts.  Refs.: The main source is The construction of value, the Carus lectures, Clarendon. But there are scattered essays on value and valuing in the Grice Papers. H. P. Grice, “Objectivity and value,” s. V, c. 8-f. 18, “The rational motivation for objective value,” s. V, c. 8-f. 19, “Value,” s. V, c. 9-f. 20; “Value, metaphysics, and teleology,” s. V, c. 9-f. 23, “Values, morals, absolutes, and the metaphysical,” s. V., c. 9-f.  24; “Value sub-systems and the Kantian problem,” s. V. c. 9-ff. 25-27; “Values and rationalism,” s. V, c. 9-f. 28; while the Carus are in the second series, in five folders, s. II, c-2, ff. 12-16, the H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.

Varzi: essential Italian philosopher. Refs.:  Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Varzi: semantica filosofia," per il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

vasto: essential Italian philosopher – Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e del Vasto," per Il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

velia -- Velia -- Grice as Eleatic -- School, strictly, two fifth-century B.C. Grecian philosophers, Parmenides and Zeno of Elea. The Ionian Grecian colony of Elea or Hyele in southern Italy became Velia in Roman times and retains that name today. A playful remark by Plato in Sophist 242d gave rise to the notion that Xenophanes of Colophon, who was active in southern Italy and Sicily, was Parmenides’ teacher, had anticipated Parmenides’ views, and founded the Eleatic School. Moreover, Melissus of Samos and according to some ancient sources even the atomist philosopher Leucippus of Abdera came to be regarded as “Eleatics,” in the sense of sharing fundamental views with Parmenides and Zeno. In the broad and traditional use of the term, the Eleatic School characteristically holds that “all is one” and that change and plurality are unreal. So stated, the School’s position is represented best by Melissus. Grice: “Crotone and Velia are the origins of western philosophy, since Greece is eastern!” – Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Grice a Velia,” Villa Grice.

verificatum: Grice: “Strictly, what is ‘verified’ is therefore ‘made true,’ analytically.” -- see ayerism. Grice would possibly NOT be interested in verificationism had not been for Ayer ‘breaking tradition’ “and other things” with it --. Oppoiste Christian virtuous –ism: falsificationism. Verificationism is one of the twelve temptations Grice finds on his way to the City of Eternal Truth. (Each one has its own entry). Oddly, Boethius was the first verificationist. He use ‘verifico’ performatively. “When I say, ‘verifico’, I verify that what I say is true.” He didn’t mean it as a sophisma (or Griceisma, but it was (mis-)understood as such! “When I was listing the temptations, I thought of calling this ‘Ayerism,’ but then I changed my mind. verification theory of meaning The theory of meaning advocated by the logical positivists and associated with the criterion of verifiability. The latter provides a criterion of meaningfulness for sentences, while the verification theory of meaning specifies the nature of meaning. According to the criterion, a sentence is cognitively meaningful if and only if it is logically possible for it to be verified. The meaning of a sentence is its method of verification, that is, the way in which it can be verified or falsified, particularly by experience. The theory has been challenged because the best formulations still exclude meaningful sentences and allow meaningless sentences. Critics also claim that the theory is a test for meaningfulness rather than a theory of meaning proper. Further, they claim that it fails to recognize that the interconnectedness of language might allow a sentence that cannot itself be verified to be meaningful. “The verification theory of meaning, which dominated the Vienna Circle, was concerned with the meaning and meaningfulness of sentences rather than words.” Quine, Theories and Things verificationism Philosophical method, philosophy of science, philosophy of language A position fundamental to logical positivism, claiming that the meaning of a statement is its method of verification. Accordingly, apparent statements lacking a method of verification, such as those of religion and metaphysics, are meaningless. Theoretical expressions can be defined in terms of the experiences by means of which assertions employing them can be verified. In the philosophy of mind, behaviorism, which tries to reduce unobserved inner states to patterns of behavior, turns out to be a version of verificationism. Some philosophers require conclusive verification for a statement to be meaningful, while others allow any positive evidence to confer meaning. There are disputes whether every statement must be verified separately or theories can be verified as a whole even if some of their statements cannot be individually verified. Attempts to offer a rigorous account of verification have run into difficulties because statements that should be excluded as meaningless nevertheless pass the test of verification and statements that should be allowed as meaningful are excluded. “For over a hundred years, one of the dominant tendencies in the philosophy of science has been verificationism, that is, the doctrine that to know the meaning of a scientific proposition . . . is to know what would be evidence for that proposition.” Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality verisimilitude Philosophy of science [from Latin verisimilar, like the truth] The degree of approximation or closeness to truth of a statement or a theory. Popper defined it in terms of the difference resulting from truth-content minus falsity-content. The truthcontent of a statement is all of its true consequences, while the falsity-content of a statement is all of its false consequences. The aim of science is to find better verisimilitude. One theory has a better verisimilitude than competing theories if it can explain the success of competing theories and can also explain cases where the other theories fail. Popper emphasized that verisimilitude is different from probability. Probability is the degree of logical certainty abstracted from content, while verisimilitude is degree of likeness to truth and combines truth and content. “This suggests that we combine here the ideas of truth and content into one – the idea of a degree of better (or worse) correspondence to truth or of greater (or less) likeness or similarity to truth; or to use a term already mentioned above (in contradistinction to probability) the idea of (degrees of ) verisimilitude.” Popper, Conjectures and Refutations.

verum: Porphyry called the verum one of the four transcendental, along with unum, pulchrum and bonum – Grice agreed. Grice’s concern with the ‘verum’ is serious. If Quine is right, and logical truth should go, so truth should go. Grice needs ‘true’ to correct a few philosophical mistakes. It is true that Grice sees a horse as a horse, for example. The nuances of the implicaturum are of a lesser concern for Grice than the taming of the true.  The root of Latin ‘vero’ is cognate with an idea Grice loved: that of ‘sincerity.’ The point is more obviously realised lexically in the negative: the fallax versus the mendax. But ‘verum’ had to do with candidum – and thus very much cognate with the English that Grice avoided, ‘truth,’ cognate with ‘trust.’ quod non possit ab honestate sejungi The true and simple Good which cannot be separated from honesty, Cicero, Academica, I, 2, but also for the ontological which one can find in Cicero’s tr. Topica, 35 of etumologia ἐτυμολογία by veriloquium. Most contemporary hypotheses propose that verus —and the words signifying true, vrai, vérité, G. wahr, G. Wahrheit — derive from an Indo-European root, *wer, which would retain meanings of to please, pleasing, manifesting benevolence, gifts, services rendered, fidelity, pact. Chantraine Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque links it to the Homeric expression êra pherein ἦϱα φέϱειν, to please, as well as to ἐπίηϱα, ἐπίηϱος, and ἐπιήϱανος, agreeable Odyssey, 19, 343, just like the Roman verus cf. se-vere, without benevolence, the G.  war, and the Russian vera, faith, or verit’ верить, to believe. Pokorny adds to this same theme the Grecian ἑοϱτή, religious feast, cult. And from the same basis have come terms signifying guarantee, protect: Fr.  garir and later garant, G.  Gewähren, Eng. warrant, to grant. According to Chantraine, this root *wer should be distinguished from another root ver-, whence eirô εἴϱω in Grecian , verbum in Roman word in English, etc., and words from the family of vereor, revereor, to fear, to respect, verecundia respectful fear. According to Chantraine, this root *wer should be distinguished from another root ver-, whence eirô εἴϱω in Grecian , verbum in Roman word in English, etc., and words from the family of vereor, revereor, to fear, to respect, verecundia respectful fear. Alfred Ernout does not support this separation. We should recall that plays on the words verum and verbum were common, as Augustine mentions verbum = verum boare, proclaiming the truth, Dialectics 1. P. Florensky, following G. Curtius, “Grundzüge der griechischen Etymologie,” also claims a single root for the ensemble of these derivations, including the Sanskrit vratum, sacred act, vow, promise, the Grecian bretas βϱέτας, cult object, wooden idol Aeschylus, Eumenides, v. 258, and the Roman “ver-bum.” The signification of verus must be considered as belonging first to the field of religious ritual and subsequently of juridical formulas: strictly speaking, verus means protected or grounded in the sense of that which is the object of a taboo or consecration Pillar and Ground. Then there’s from the juridical to the philosophical. “Verum” implies a rectification of an adversarial allegation considered to be fraudulent, as is indicated by the original opposition verax/fallax-mendax. It thus signifies the properly founded in fact or in the rules of law: crimen verissimum a well-founded accusation Cicero, In Verrem, 5, 15. In texts of grammar and rhetoric, but also in juridical texts as well, verus and veritas signify the veracity of the rule, inasmuch as it can be distinguished from usage. “Quid verum sit intellego; sed alias ita loquor ut concessum est I know what is correct, but sometimes I avail myself of the variation in usage, Cicero, De oratore, Loeb Classical Library; Consule veritatem: reprehendet; refer ad auris: probabunt If you consult the strict rule of analogy, it will say this practice is wrong, but if you consult the ear, it will approve 1586. The juridical connotation of the word verus and thus of veritas is retained and subsequently reinforced. In the glosses of the Middle Ages, verus signifies legitimate and the Roman sense of the word, legal and authentic or conforming to existing law. One normally finds “verum est” in legal texts to certify that a new rule conforms to preexisting ones Digest, 8, 4, 1. It is this juridical dimension that produces the meaning of verus as authenticated, authentic in contrast to false, imitative, deceiving and thus real as in real cream or a genuine Rolex watch.  The juridical here provides a foundation not only for the moral Verum et simplex bonum. The paradigm of “verum” is not easy to separate from any epistemological dimensions, as is evident in the varied fates of the Indo-European root *wer, from which derives, in addition to vera in Russian, belief, the old Fr.  garir, in the sense of certifying as true, designating as true, whence the participle garant. The evolution of these derived words inscribes G. “wahr,” and “Wahrheit” in a semantic network from which emerge two directions, belief and salvation. Belief. “Wahr” is often linked back, in composite words, to the idea of belief, in the sense of true belief, to take as true. “Wahrsagen,” to predict, “wahr haben,” to admit, agree upon, “für wahr halten,” to hold as true, to believe. This is the term that Kant employs in the Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental theory of method, ch.2, 3 On Opinion, Science, and Belief: “das Fürwahrhalten” is a belief, as a modality of subjectivity, that can be divided into conviction Überzeugung or persuasion Überredung and that is capable of three degrees: opinion Meinung, belief Glaube, and science Wissenschaft. Safeguarding, conservation. Similarly “wahren,” “bewahren” in the sense of to guard, to conserve is linked to “Wahrung” in the sense of defending one’s interests or safeguarding. One might refer to Heidegger’s use of this etymological and semantic relation in reference to Nietzsche. It remains to be said that many common or colloquial expressions, in Fr.  as well as in English, play on the semantic slippages of vrai and real, between the ontological sense and linguistic meanings. Thus in Fr. , c’est pas vrai! does not mean it is false, but rather that it is not reality. In English, the opposite is the case: get real! means come back down to earth, accept the truth. Grice’s main manoeuvre may be seen as intended to crack the crib of reality. For he wants to say some philosophers engaged in conceptual analysis are misled if they think an inappropriate usage reveals a truth-condition. By coining ‘implicaturum,’ his point is to give room for “Emissor E communicates that p,” as opposed to ‘emissum x ‘means’ ‘p.’ Therefore, Grice can claim that an utterance may very well totally baffling and misleading YET TRUE (or otherwise ‘good’), and that in no way that reveals anything about the emissum itself. This is due to the fact that ‘Emissor E communicates that p’ is diaphanous. And one can conjoin what the emissor E communicates to what he explicitly conveys and NOT HAVE the emissor contradicting himself or uttering a falsehood. And that is what in philosophy should count. H. P. Grice was always happy with a ‘correspondence’ theory of truth. It was what Aristotle thought. So why change? The fact that Austin agreed helped. The fact that Strawson applied Austin’s shining new tool of the performatory had him fashion a new shining skid, and that helped, because, once Grice has identified a philosophical mistake, that justifies his role as methodologist in trying to ‘correct’ the mistake. The Old Romans did not have an article. For them it is the unum, the verum, the bonum, and the pulchrum. They were trying to translate the very articled Grecian ‘to alethes,’ ‘to agathon,’ and ‘to kallon.’ Grecian Grice is able to restore the articles. He would use ‘the alethic’ for the ‘verum,’ after von Wright. But occasionally uses the ‘verum’ root. E. g. when his account of ‘personal identity’ was seen to fail to distinguish between a ‘veridical’ memory and a non-veridical one. If it had not been for Strawson’s ‘ditto’ theory to the ‘verum,’ Grice would not have minded much. Like Austin, his inclination was for a ‘correspondence’ theory of truth alla Aristotle and Tarski, applied to the utterance, or ‘expressum.’ So, while we cannot say that an utterer is TRUE, we can say that he is TRUTHFUL, and trustworthy (Anglo-Saxon ‘trust,’ being cognate with ‘true,’ and covering both the credibility and desirability realms. Grice approaches the ‘verum’ in terms of predicate calculus. So we need at least an utterance of the form, ‘the dog is shaggy.’ An utterance of ‘The dog is shaggy’ is true iff the denotatum of ‘the dog’ is a member of the class ‘shaggy.’ So, when it comes to ‘verum,’ Grice feels like ‘solving’ a problem rather than looking for new ones. He thought that Strawson’s controversial ‘ditto’ was enough of a problem ‘to get rid of.’ VERUM. Along with verum, comes the falsum. fallibilism, the doctrine, relative to some significant class of beliefs or propositions, that they are inherently uncertain and possibly mistaken. The most extreme form of the doctrine attributes uncertainty to every belief; more restricted forms attribute it to all empirical beliefs or to beliefs concerning the past, the future, other minds, or the external world. Most contemporary philosophers reject the doctrine in its extreme form, holding that beliefs about such things as elementary logical principles and the character of one’s current feelings cannot possibly be mistaken. Philosophers who reject fallibilism in some form generally insist that certain beliefs are analytically true, self-evident, or intuitively obvious. These means of supporting the infallibility of faculty psychology fallibilism 303   303 some beliefs are now generally discredited. W. V. Quine has cast serious doubt on the very notion of analytic truth, and the appeal to self-evidence or intuitive obviousness is open to the charge that those who officially accept it do not always agree on what is thus evident or obvious there is no objective way of identifying it, and that beliefs said to be self-evident have sometimes been proved false, the causal principle and the axiom of abstraction in set theory being striking examples. In addition to emphasizing the evolution of logical and mathematical principles, fallibilists have supported their position mainly by arguing that the existence and nature of mind-independent objects can legitimately be ascertained only be experimental methods and that such methods can yield conclusions that are, at best, probable rather than certain. false consciousness, 1 lack of clear awareness of the source and significance of one’s beliefs and attitudes concerning society, religion, or values; 2 objectionable forms of ignorance and false belief; 3 dishonest forms of self-deception. Marxists if not Marx use the expression to explain and condemn illusions generated by unfair economic relationships. Thus, workers who are unaware of their alienation, and “happy homemakers” who only dimly sense their dependency and quiet desperation, are molded in their attitudes by economic power relationships that make the status quo seem natural, thereby eclipsing their long-term best interests. Again, religion is construed as an economically driven ideology that functions as an “opiate” blocking clear awareness of human needs. Collingwood interprets false consciousness as self-corrupting untruthfulness in disowning one’s emotions and ideas The Principles of Art, 8.  . false pleasure, pleasure taken in something false. If it is false that Jones is honest, but Smith believes Jones is honest and is pleased that Jones is honest, then Smith’s pleasure is false. If pleasure is construed as an intentional attitude, then the truth or falsity of a pleasure is a function of whether its intentional object obtains. On this view, S’s being pleased that p is a true pleasure if an only if S is pleased that p and p is true. S’s being pleased that p is a false pleasure if and only if S is pleased that p and p is false. Alternatively, Plato uses the expression ‘false pleasure’ to refer to things such as the cessation of pain or neutral states that are neither pleasant nor painful that a subject confuses with genuine or true pleasures. Thus, being released from tight shackles might mistakenly be thought pleasant when it is merely the cessation of a pain. Refs: Grice, “Rationality and Trust,” Grice, “The alethic.” “P. F. Strawson and the performatory account of ‘true’”, The Grice Papers.

vico --  Danesi, Marcel. Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language. Bloomington: Indiana. Serious scholars of Vico as well as glottogeneticists will find much of value in this excellent monograph. Vico Studies. A provocative, well-researched argument which might find reapplication in philosophy." —Theological Book Review. Danesi returns to Vico to create a persuasive, original account of the evolution and development of language, one of the deep mysteries of human existence. The Vico’s reconstruction of the origin of language is described at length, then evaluated in light of Grice’s philosophical conversational pragmatics. Glottogenesis Vico’s Reconstruction. The New Science Basic Notions. Language and the Imagination: Vito’s Glottogenetic Scenario Vico’s Approach Reconstructing the Primal Scene After the Primal Scence. The Dawn of Communication: Iconicity and Mimesis Hypotheses The Nature of Iconicity. Imagery, Iconicity, and Gesture. Iconic Representation. Osmosis Hypothesis Ontogenesis From Percepts to Concepts The Metaphoricity Metaphor Metaphor and Concept-Formation Mentation, Narrativity, and Myth  The Sociobiological-Computationist Viewpoint:A Vichian Critique The Vichian Scenario Revisited Revisting the Genetic Perspective computationism. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Vico e Grice,” Villa Grice.

vis: When in a Latinate mood, Grice would refer to a ‘vis’ of an expression. Apparently, ‘vis’ is cognate with ‘validum,’ transf., of abstr. things, force, notion, meaning, sense, import, nature, essence (cf. significatio): “id, in quo est omnis vis amicitiae,” Cic. Lael. 4, 15: “eloquentiae vis et natura,” id. Or. 31, 112: “vis honesti (with natura),” id. Off. 1, 6, 18; cf. id. Fin. 1, 16, 50: “virtutis,” id. Fam. 9, 16, 5: “quae est alia vis legis?” id. Dom. 20, 53: “vis, natura, genera verborum et simplicium et copulatorum,” i.e. the sense, signification, id. Or. 32, 115: “vis verbi,” id. Inv. 1, 13, 17; id. Balb. 8, 21: “quae vis insit in his paucis verbis, si attendes, si attendes, intelleges,” id. Fam. 6, 2, 3: “quae vis subjecta sit vocibus,” id. Fin. 2, 2, 6: “nominis,” id. Top. 8, 35: μετωνυμία, cujus vis est, pro eo, quod dicitur, causam, propter quam dicitur, ponere, Quint. 8, 6, 23.

vagum – Oddly, Grice does not have a conversational, ‘be precise,’; but he did. In his earlier desideratum of conversational clarity, the point was to make your point precise – rather than fuzzy -- vagueness, a property of an expression in virtue of which it can give rise to a “borderline case.” A borderline case is a situation in which the application of a particular expression to a name of a particular object does not generate an expression with a definite truth-value; i.e., the piece of language in question neither unequivocally applies to the object nor fails to apply. Although such a formulation leaves it open what the pieces of language might be whole sentences, individual words, names or singular terms, predicates or general terms, most discussions have focused on vague general terms and have considered other types of terms to be nonvague. Exceptions to this have called attention to the possibility of vague objects, thereby rendering vague the designation relation for singular terms. The formulation also leaves open the possible causes for the expression’s lacking a definite truth-value. If this indeterminacy is due to there being insufficient information available to determine applicability or non-applicability of the term i.e., we are convinced the term either does or does not apply, but we just do not have enough information to determine which, then this is sometimes called epistemic vagueness. It is somewhat misleading to call this vagueness, for unlike true vagueness, this epistemic vagueness disappears if more information is brought into the situation. ‘There are between 1.89 $ 106 and 1.9 $ 106 stars in the sky’ is epistemically vague but is not vague in the generally accepted sense of the term. ’Vagueness’ may also be used to characterize non-linguistic items such as concepts, memories, and objects, as well as such semilinguistic items as statements and propositions. Many of the issues involved in discussing the topic of vagueness impinge upon other philosophical topics, such as the existence of truth-value gaps  declarative sentences that are neither true nor false  and the plausibility of many-valued logic. There are other related issues such as the nature of propositions and whether they must be either true or false. We focus here on linguistic vagueness, as it manifests itself with general terms; for it is this sort of indeterminacy that defines what most researchers call vagueness, and which has led the push in some schools of thought to “eliminate vagueness” or to construct languages that do not manifest vagueness. Linguistic vagueness is sometimes confused with other linguistic phenomena: generality, ambiguity, and open texture. Statements can be general ‘Some wheelbarrows are red’, ‘All insects have antennae’ and if there is no other vagueness infecting them, they are true or false  and not borderline or vague. Terms can be general ‘person’, ‘dog’ without being vague. Those general terms apply to many different objects but are not therefore vague; and furthermore, the fact that they apply to different kinds of objects ‘person’ applies to both men and women also does not show them to be vague or ambiguous. A vague term admits of borderline cases  a completely determinate situation in which there just is no correct answer as to whether the term applies to a certain object or not  and this is not the case with generality. Ambiguous linguistic items, including structurally ambiguous sentences, also do not have this feature unless they also contain vague terms. Rather, an ambiguous sentence allows there to be a completely determinate situation in which one can simultaneously correctly affirm the sentence and also deny the sentence, depending on which of the claims allowed by the ambiguities is being affirmed or denied. Terms are considered open-textured if they are precise along some dimensions of their meaning but where other possible dimensions simply have not been considered. It would therefore not be clear what the applicability of the term would be were objects to vary along these other dimensions. Although related to vagueness, open texture is a different notion. Friedrich Waismann, who coined the term, put it this way: “Open texture . . . is something like the possibility of vagueness.” Vagueness has long been an irritant to philosophers of logic and language. Among the oldest of the puzzles associated with vagueness is the sorites ‘heap’ paradox reported by Cicero Academica 93: One grain of sand does not make a heap, and adding a grain of sand to something that is not a heap will not create a heap; there945 V   945 fore there are no heaps. This type of paradox is traditionally attributed to Zeno of Elea, who said that a single millet seed makes no sound when it falls, so a basket of millet seeds cannot make a sound when it is dumped. The term ‘sorites’ is also applied to the entire series of paradoxes that have this form, such as the falakros ‘bald man’, Diogenes Laertius, Grammatica II, 1, 45: A man with no hairs is bald, and adding one hair to a bald man results in a bald man; therefore all men are bald. The original version of these sorites paradoxes is attributed to Eubulides Diogenes Laertius II, 108: “Isn’t it true that two are few? and also three, and also four, and so on until ten? But since two are few, ten are also few.” The linchpin in all these paradoxes is the analysis of vagueness in terms of some underlying continuum along which an imperceptible or unimportant change occurs. Almost all modern accounts of the logic of vagueness have assumed this to be the correct analysis of vagueness, and have geared their logics to deal with such vagueness. But we will see below that there are other kinds of vagueness too. The search for a solution to the sorites-type paradoxes has been the stimulus for much research into alternative semantics. Some philosophers, e.g. Frege, view vagueness as a pervasive defect of natural language and urge the adoption of an artificial language in which each predicate is completely precise, without borderline cases. Russell too thought vagueness thoroughly infected natural language, but thought it unavoidable  and indeed beneficial  for ordinary usage and discourse. Despite the occasional argument that vagueness is pragmatic rather than a semantic phenomenon, the attitude that vagueness is inextricably bound to natural language together with the philosophical logician’s self-ascribed task of formalizing natural language semantics has led modern writers to the exploration of alternative logics that might adequately characterize vagueness  i.e., that would account for our pretheoretic beliefs concerning truth, falsity, necessary truth, validity, etc., of sentences containing vague predicates. Some recent writers have also argued that vague language undermines realism, and that it shows our concepts to be “incoherent.” Long ago it was seen that the attempt to introduce a third truth-value, indeterminate, solved nothing  replacing, as it were, the sharp cutoff between a predicate’s applying and not applying with two sharp cutoffs. Similar remarks could be made against the adoption of any finitely manyvalued logic as a characterization of vagueness. In the late 0s and early 0s, fuzzy logic was introduced into the philosophic world. Actually a restatement of the Tarski-Lukasiewicz infinitevalued logics of the 0s, one of the side benefits of fuzzy logics was claimed to be an adequate logic for vagueness. In contrast to classical logic, in which there are two truth-values true and false, in fuzzy logic a sentence is allowed to take any real number between 0 and 1 as a truthvalue. Intuitively, the closer to 1 the value is, the “more true” the sentence is. The value of a negated sentence is 1 minus the value of the unnegated sentence; conjuction is viewed as a minimum function and disjunction as a maximum function. Thus, a conjunction takes the value of the “least true” conjunct, while a disjunction takes the value of the “most true” disjunct. Since vague sentences are maximally neither true nor false, they will be valued at approximately 0.5. It follows that if F is maximally vague, so is the negation -F; and so are the conjunction F & -F and the disjunction ~F 7 -F. Some theorists object to these results, but defenders of fuzzy logic have argued in favor of them. Other theorists have attempted to capture the elusive logic of vagueness by employing modal logic, having the operators AF meaning ‘F is definite’ and B F meaning ‘F is vague’. The logic generated in this way is peculiar in that A F & YPAF & AY is not a theorem. E.g., p & -p is definitely false, hence definite; hence A p & -p. Yet neither p nor -p need be definite. Technically, it is a non-Kripke-normal modal logic. Some other peculiarities are that AF Q A -F is a theorem, and that AFPBF is not. There are also puzzles about whether B FP ABF should be a theorem, and about iterated modalities in general. Modal logic treatments of vagueness have not attracted many advocates, except as a portion of a general epistemic logic i.e., modal logics might be seen as an account of so-called epistemic vagueness. A third direction that has been advocated as a logical account of vagueness has been the method of supervaluations sometimes called “supertruth”. The underlying idea here is to allow the vague predicate in a sentence to be “precisified” in an arbitrary manner. Thus, for the sentence ‘Friar Tuck is bald’, we arbitrarily choose a precise number of hairs on the head that will demarcate the bald/not-bald border. In this valuation Friar Tuck is either definitely bald or definitely not bald, and the sentence either is true or is false. Next, we alter the valuation so that there is some other bald/not-bald bordervagueness vagueness 946   946 line, etc. A sentence true in all such valuations is deemed “really true” or “supertrue”; one false in all such valuations is “really false” or “superfalse.” All others are vague. Note that, in this conception of vagueness, if F is vague, so is -F. However, unlike fuzzy logic ‘F & -F’ is not evaluated as vague  it is false in every valuation and hence is superfalse. And ‘F 7 -F’ is supertrue. These are seen by some as positive features of the method of supervaluations, and as an argument against the whole fuzzy logic enterprise. In fact there seem to be at least two distinct types of linguistic vagueness, and it is not at all clear that any of the previously mentioned logic approaches can deal with both. Without going into the details, we can just point out that the “sorites vagueness” discussed above presumes an ordering on a continuous underlying scale; and it is the indistinguishability of adjacent points on this scale that gives rise to borderline cases. But there are examples of vague terms for which there is no such scale. A classic example is ‘religion’: there are a number of factors relevant to determining whether a social practice is a religion. Having none of these properties guarantees failing to be a religion, and having all of them guarantees being one. However, there is no continuum of the sorites variety here; for example, it is easy to distinguish possessing four from possessing five of the properties, unlike the sorites case where such a change is imperceptible. In the present type of vagueness, although we can tell these different cases apart, we just do not know whether to call the practice a religion or not. Furthermore, some of the properties or combinations of properties are more important or salient in determining whether the practice is a religion than are other properties or combinations. We might call this family resemblance vagueness: there are a number of clearly distinguishable conditions of varying degrees of importance, and family resemblance vagueness is attributed to there being no definite answer to the question, How many of which conditions are necessary for the term to apply? Other examples of family resemblance vagueness are ‘schizophrenia sufferer’, ‘sexual perversion’, and the venerable ‘game’. A special subclass of family resemblance vagueness occurs when there are pairs of underlying properties that normally co-occur, but occasionally apply to different objects. Consider, e.g., ‘tributary’. When two rivers meet, one is usually considered a tributary of the other. Among the properties relevant to being a tributary rather than the main river are: relative volume of water and relative length. Normally, the shorter of the two rivers has a lesser volume, and in that case it is the tributary of the other. But occasionally the two properties do not co-occur and then there is a conflict, giving rise to a kind of vagueness we might call conflict vagueness. The term ‘tributary’ is vague because its background conditions admit of such conflicts: there are borderline cases when these two properties apply to different objects. To conclude: the fundamental philosophical problems involving vagueness are 1 to give an adequate characterization of what the phenomenon is, and 2 to characterize our ability to reason with these terms. These were the problems for the ancient philosophers, and they remain the problems for modern philosophers. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The conversational maxim for vagueness avoidance.”

vaihinger: Grice once gave a seminar on Vaihinger – “but thinking it would not attract that many, I titled it ‘As if.’” – H. P. Grice. philosopher best known for Die Philosophie des Als Ob; tr. by C. K. Ogden as The Philosophy of “As If” in 4. A neo-Kantian, he was also influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. His commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 2 vols., 1 is still a standard work. Vaihinger was a cofounder of both the Kant Society and Kant-Studien. The “philosophy of the as if” involves the claim that values and ideals amount only to “fictions” that serve “life” even if they are irrational. We must act “as if” they were true because they have biological utility.

valentinianism: a form of Christian gnosticism of Alexandrian origin, founded by Valentinus in the second century and propagated by Theodotus in Eastern, and Heracleon in Western, Christianity. To every gnostic, pagan or Christian, knowledge leads to salvation from the perishable, material world. Valentinianism therefore prompted famous refutations by Tertullian Adversus Valentinianos and Irenaeus Adversus haereses. The latter accused the Valentinians of maintaining “creatio ex nihilo.” Valentinus is believed to have authored the Peri trion phuseon, the Evangelium veritatis, and the Treatise on the Resurrection. Since only a few fragments of these remain, his Neoplatonic cosmogony is accessible mainly through his opponents and critics Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria and in the Nag Hammadi codices. To explain the origins of creation and of evil, Valentinus separated God primal Father from the Creator Demiurge and attributed the cruVaihinger, Hans Valentinianism 947   947 cial role in the processes of emanation and redemption to Sophia. 

valentinus: gnostic teacher, born in Alexandria, where he taught until he moved to Rome. A dualist, he constructed an elaborate cosmology in which God the Father Bythos, or Deep Unknown unites the the feminine Silence Sige and in the overflow of love produces thirty successive divine emanations or aeons constituting the Pleroma fullness of the Godhead. Each emanation is arranged hierarchically with a graded existence, becoming progressively further removed from the Father and hence less divine. The lowest emanation, Sophia wisdom, yields to passion and seeks to reach, beyond her ability, to the Father, which causes her fall. In the process, she causes the creation of the material universe wherein resides evil and the loss of divine sparks from the Pleroma. The divine elements are embodied in those humans who are the elect. Jesus Christ is an aeon close to the Father and is sent to retrieve the souls into the heavenly Pleroma. Valentinus wrote a gospel. His sect stood out in the early church for ordaining women priests and prophetesses. Grice: “Since he lived in Rome, he was almost a Roman.” – Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Valentinus e Grice,” Villa Grice.

vailati: n important figure in the history of formal semantics, influenced by Peano, who in turn influenced Whitehead and Russell, and thus Grice. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Vailati: la semantica filosofica," The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

valla: l. humanist and historian who taught rhetoric in Pavia and was later secretary of King Alfonso I of Aragona in Naples, and apostolic secretary in Rome under Pope Nicholas V. In his dialogue On Pleasure or On the True Good 143134, Stoic and Epicurean interlocutors present their ethical views, which Valla proceeds to criticize from a Christian point of view. This work is often regarded as a defense of Epicurean hedonism, because Valla equates the good with pleasure; but he claims that Christians can find pleasure only in heaven. His description of the Christian pleasures reflects the contemporary Renaissance attitude toward the joys of life and might have contributed to Valla’s reputation for hedonism. In the later work, On Free Will between 1435 and 1448, Valla discusses the conflict between divine foreknowledge and human freedom and rejects Boethius’s then predominantly accepted solution. Valla distinguishes between God’s knowledge and God’s will, but denies that there is a rational solution of the apparent conflict between God’s will and human freedom. As a historian, he is famous for The Donation of Constantine 1440, which denounces as spurious the famous document on which medieval jurists and theologians based the papal rights to secular power. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Valla e Grice,” Villa Grice.

valitum: value, the worth of something. Philosophers have discerned these main forms: intrinsic, instrumental, inherent, and relational value. Intrinsic value may be taken as basic and many of the others defined in terms of it. Among the many attempts to explicate the concept of intrinsic value, some deal primarily with the source of value, while others employ the concept of the “fittingness” or “appropriateness” to it of certain kinds of emotions and desires. The first is favored by Moore and the second by Brentano. Proponents of the first view hold that the intrinsic value of X is the value that X has solely in virtue of its intrinsic nature. Thus, the state of affairs, Smith’s experiencing pleasure, has intrinsic value provided it has value solely in virtue of its intrinsic nature. Followers of the second approach explicate intrinsic value in terms of the sorts of emotions and desires appropriate to a thing “in and for itself” or “for its own sake”. Thus, one might say X has intrinsic value or is intrinsically good if and only if X is worthy of desire in and for itself, or, alternatively, it is fitting or appropriate for anyone to favor X in and for itself. Thus, the state of affairs of Smith’s experiencing pleasure is intrinsically valuable provided that state of affairs is worthy of desire for its own sake, or it is fitting for anyone to favor that state of affairs in and for itself. Concerning the other forms of value, we may say that X has instrumental value if and only if it is a means to, or causally contributes to, something that is intrinsically valuable. If Smith’s experiencing pleasure is intrinsically valuable and his taking a warm bath is a means to, or Valentinus value 948   948 causally contributes to, his being pleased, then his taking a warm bath is instrumentally valuable or “valuable as a means.” Similarly, if health is intrinsically valuable and exercise is a means to health, then exercise is instrumentally valuable. X has inherent value if and only if the experience, awareness, or contemplation of X is intrinsically valuable. If the experience of a beautiful sunset is intrinsically valuable, then the beautiful sunset has inherent value. X has contributory value if and only if X contributes to the value of some whole, W, of which it is a part. If W is a whole that consists of the facts that Smith is pleased and Brown is pleased, then the fact that Smith is pleased contributes to the value of W, and Smith’s being pleased has contributory value. Our example illustrates that something can have contributory value without having instrumental value, for the fact that Smith is pleased is not a means to W and, strictly speaking, it does not bring about or causally contribute to W. Given the distinction between instrumental and contributory value, we may say that certain sorts of experiences and activities can have contributory value if they are part of an intrinsically valuable life and contribute to its value, even though they are not means to it. Finally, we may say that X has relational value if and only if X has value in virtue of bearing some relation to something else. Instrumental, inherent, and contributory value may be construed as forms of relational value. But there are other forms of relational value one might accept, e.g. one might hold that X is valuable for S in virtue of being desired by S or being such that S would desire X were S “fully informed” and “rational.” Some philosophers defend the organicity of intrinsic value. Moore, for example, held that the intrinsic value of a whole is not necessarily equal to the sum of the intrinsic values of its parts. According to this view, the presence of an intrinsically good part might lower the intrinsic value of a whole of which it is a part and the presence of an intrinsically bad part might raise the intrinsic value of a whole to which it belongs. Defenders of organicity sometimes point to examples of Mitfreude taking joy or pleasure in another’s joy and Schadenfreude taking joy or pleasure in another’s suffering to illustrate their view. Suppose Jones believes incorrectly that Smith is happy and Brown believes incorrectly that Gray is suffering, but Jones is pleased that Smith is happy and Brown is pleased that Gray is suffering. The former instance of Mitfreude seems intrinsically better than the latter instance of Schadenfreude even though they are both instances of pleasure and neither whole has an intrinsically bad part. The value of each whole is not a “mere sum” of the values of its parts.  Valitum -- axiology: value theory, also called axiology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of value and with what kinds of things have value. Construed very broadly, value theory is concerned with all forms of value, such as the aesthetic values of beauty and ugliness, the ethical values of right, wrong, obligation, virtue, and vice, and the epistemic values of justification and lack of justification. Understood more narrowly, value theory is concerned with what is intrinsically valuable or ultimately worthwhile and desirable for its own sake and with the related concepts of instrumental, inherent, and contributive value. When construed very broadly, the study of ethics may be taken as a branch of value theory, but understood more narrowly value theory may be taken as a branch of ethics. In its more narrow form, one of the chief questions of the theory of value is, What is desirable for its own sake? One traditional sort of answer is hedonism. Hedonism is roughly the view that i the only intrinsically good experiences or states of affairs are those containing pleasure, and the only instrinsically bad experiences or states of affairs are those containing pain; ii all experiences or states of affairs that contain more pleasure than pain are intrinsically good and all experiences or states of affairs that contain more pain than pleasure are intrinsically bad; and iii any experience or state of affairs that is intrinsically good is so in virtue of being pleasant or containing pleasure and any experience or state of affairs that is intrinsically bad is so in virtue of being painful or involving pain. Hedonism has been defended by philosophers such as Epicurus, Bentham, Sidgwick, and, with significant qualifications, J. S. Mill. Other philosophers, such as C. I. Lewis, and, perhaps, Brand Blanshard, have held that what is intrinsically or ultimately desirable are experiences that exhibit “satisfactoriness,” where being pleasant is but one form of being satisfying. Other philosophers have recognized a plurality of things other than pleasure or satisfaction as having intrinsic value. Among the value pluralists are Moore, Rashdall, Ross, Brentano, Hartmann, and Scheler. In addition to certain kinds of pleasures, these thinkers count some or all of the following as intrinsically good: consciousness and the flourishing of life, knowledge and insight, moral virtue and virtuous actions, friendship and mutual affection, beauty and aesthetic experience, a just distribution of goods, and self-expression. Many, if not all, of the philosophers mentioned above distinguish between what has value or is desirable for its own sake and what is instrumentally valuable. Furthermore, they hold that what is desirable for its own sake or intrinsically good has a value not dependent on anyone’s having an interest in it. Both of these claims have been challenged by other value theorists. Dewey, for example, criticizes any sharp distinction between what is intrinsically good or good as an end and what is good as a means on the ground that we adopt and abandon ends to the extent that they serve as means to the resolution of conflicting impulses and desires. Perry denies that anything can have value without being an object of interest. Indeed, Perry claims that ‘X is valuable’ means ‘Interest is taken in X’ and that it is a subject’s interest in a thing that confers value on it. Insofar as he holds that the value of a thing is dependent upon a subject’s interest in that thing, Perry’s value theory is a subjective theory and contrasts sharply with objective theories holding that some things have value not dependent on a subject’s interests or attitudes. Some philosophers, dissatisfied with the view that value depends on a subject’s actual interests and theories, have proposed various alternatives, including theories holding that the value of a thing depends on what a subject would desire or have an interest in if he were fully rational or if desires were based on full information. Such theories may be called “counterfactual” desire theories since they take value to be dependent, not upon a subject’s actual interests, but upon what a subject would desire if certain conditions, which do not obtain, were to obtain. Value theory is also concerned with the nature of value. Some philosophers have denied that sentences of the forms ‘X is good’ or ‘X is intrinsically good’ are, strictly speaking, either true or false. As with other forms of ethical discourse, they claim that anyone who utters these sentences is either expressing his emotional attitudes or else prescribing or commending something. Other philosophers hold that such sentences can express what is true or false, but disagree about the nature of value and the meaning of value terms like ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘better’. Some philosophers, such as Moore, hold that in a truth of the form ‘X is intrinsically good’, ‘good’ refers to a simple, unanalyzable, non-natural property, a property not identical with or analyzable by any “natural” property such as being pleasant or being desired. Moore’s view is one form of non-naturalism. Other philosophers, such as Brentano, hold that ‘good’ is a syncategorematic expression; as such it does not refer to a property or relation at all, though it contributes to the meaning of the sentence. Still other philosophers have held that ‘X is good’ and ‘X is intrinsically good’ can be analyzed in natural or non-ethical terms. This sort of naturalism about value is illustrated by Perry, who holds that ‘X is valuable’ means ‘X is an object of interest’. The history of value theory is full of other attempted naturalistic analyses, some of which identify or analyze ‘good’ in terms of pleasure or being the object of rational desire. Many philosophers argue that naturalism is preferable on epistemic grounds. If, e.g., ‘X is valuable’ just means ‘X is an object of interest’, then in order to know whether something is valuable, one need only know whether it is the object of someone’s interest. Our knowledge of value is fundamentally no different in kind from our knowledge of any other empirical fact. This argument, however, is not decisive against non-naturalism, since it is not obvious that there is no synthetic a priori knowledge of the sort Moore takes as the fundamental value cognition. Furthermore, it is not clear that one cannot combine non-naturalism about value with a broadly empirical epistemology, one that takes certain kinds of experience as epistemic grounds for beliefs about value.  Valitum -- valid, having the property that a well-formed formula, argument, argument form, or rule of inference has when it is logically correct in a certain respect. A well-formed formula is valid if it is true under every admissible reinterpretation of its non-logical symbols. If truth-value gaps or multiple truth-values are allowed, ‘true’ here might be replaced by ‘non-false’ or takes a “designated” truth-value. An argument is valid if it is impossible for the premises all to be true and, at the same time, the conclusion false. An argument form schema is valid if every argument of that form is valid. A rule of inference is valid if it cannot lead from all true premises to a false conclusion. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The conception of value,” The Paul Carus Lectures for the American Philosophical Association, published by Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.

vanini:  philosopher, a Renaissance Aristotelian who studied law and theology. He became a monk and traveled all over Europe. After abjuring, he taught and practiced medicine. He was burned at the stake by the Inquisition. His major work is four volumes of dialogues, De admirandis naturae reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis “On the Secrets of Nature, Queen and Goddess of Mortal Beings,” 1616. He was influenced by Averroes and Pietro Pomponazzi, whom he regarded as his teacher. Vanini rejects revealed religion and claims that God is immanent in nature. The world is ruled by a necessary natural order and is eternal. Like Averroes, he denies the immortality and the immateriality of the human soul. Like Pomponazzi, he denies the existence of miracles and claims that all apparently extraordinary phenomena can be shown to have natural causes and to be predetermined. Despite the absence of any original contribution, from the second half of the seventeenth century Vanini was popular as a symbol of free and atheist thought. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Vanini e Grice,” Villa Grice.

variable: in semantics, a symbol interpreted so as to be associated with a range of values, a set of entities any one of which may be temporarily assigned as a value of the variable. Grice uses more specifically for a variable for a ‘grice,’ a type of extinct pig that existed (‘in the past’) in Northern England – “There is a variable number of grices in the backyard, Paul.” An occurrence of a variable in a mathematical or logical expression is a free occurrence if assigning a value is necessary in order for the containing expression to acquire a semantic value  a denotation, truth-value, or other meaning. Suppose a semantic value is assigned to a variable and the same value is attached to a constant as meaning of the same kind; if an expression contains free occurrences of just that variable, the value of the expression for that assignment of value to the variable is standardly taken to be the same as the value of the expression obtained by substituting the constant for all the free occurrences of the variable. A bound occurrence of a variable is one that is not free. Grice: “Strictly, a variable is the opposite of a constant, but a constant varies – ain’t that paradoxical?” -- H. P. Grice, “The variable and the constant;” H. P. Grice, “Variable and meta-variable,” “Order and variable.”

vauvenargues: luc de Clapiers de, army officer and secular moralist. Discovering Plutarch at an early age, he critically adopted Stoic idealism. Poverty-stricken, obscure, and solitary, he was ambitious for glory. Though eventful, his military career brought little reward. In poor health, he resigned in 1744 to write. In 1747, he published Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind, followed by Reflections and Maxims. Voltaire and Mirabeau praised his vigorous and eclectic thought, which aimed at teaching people how to live. Vauvenargues was a deist and an optimist who equally rejected Bossuet’s Christian pessimism and La Rochefoucauld’s secular pessimism. He asserted human freedom and natural goodness, but denied social and political equality. A lover of martial virtues and noble passions, Vauvenargues crafted memorable maxims and excelled in character depiction. His complete works were published in 1862. 

vattimo: Italian philosopher – not one that provinicial Beaney would include in his handbooks and dictionaries – Vattimo’s philosophy shares quite a bit with Grice’s programme, as anyone familiar with both Vattimo and Grice may testify. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Vattimo," The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

vazquez: g. Jesuit theologian and philosopher. Born in Villaescusa de Haro, he studied at Alcalá de Henares and taught at Ocaña, Madrid, Alcalá, and Rome. He was a prolific writer; his philosophically most important work is a commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Vázquez was strongly influenced by Aquinas, but he differed from him in important ways and showed marked leanings toward Augustine. He rejected the Thomistic doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence and the position that matter designated by quantity materia signata quantitate is the principle of individuation. Instead of Aquinas’s five ways for proving the existence of God, he favored a version of the moral argument similar to the one later used by Kant and also favored the teleological argument. Following Augustine, he described the union of body and soul as a union of two parts. Finally, Vázquez modified the doctrine of formal and objective concepts present in Toletus and Suárez in a way that facilitated the development of idealism in early modern philosophy. He accomplished this by identifying the actual being esse of the thing that is known conceptus objectivus with the act conceptus formalis whereby it is known.  

venn diagram, a logic diagram invented by the English philosopher J. Venn in which standard form statements the four kinds listed below are represented by two appropriately marked overlapping circles, as follows: Syllogisms are represented by three overlapping circles, as in the examples below. If a few simple rules are followed, e.g. “diagram universal premises first,” then in a valid syllogism diagramming the premises automatically gives a diagram in which the conclusion is represented. In an invalid syllogism diagramming the premises does not automatically give a diagram in which the conclusion is represented, as below. Venn diagrams are less perspicuous for the beginner than Euler diagrams. Grice: “I tried to teach Strawson some Euler first; but English as he is, he said, ‘Stick with Venn.’” – Refs.: H. P. Grice, “From Euler to Strawson via Venn: diagramme and impicaturum.”

Verri: essential Italian philosopher. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Verri," per il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

Verum – Grice: “From ‘verum’ we have to ‘make’ true, as the Romans put it, ‘verificare’ -- verificatum -- verificationism, a metaphysical theory about what determines meaning: the meaning of a statement consists in its methods of verification. Verificationism thus differs radically from the account that identifies meaning with truth conditions, as is implicit in Frege’s work and explicit in Vitters’s Tractatus and throughout the writings of Davidson. On Davidson’s theory, e.g., the crucial notions for a theory of meaning are truth and falsity. Contemporary verificationists, under the influence of the Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett, propose what they see as a constraint on the concept of truth rather than a criterion of meaningfulness. No foundational place is generally assigned in modern verificationist semantics to corroboration by observation statements; and modern verificationism is not reductionist. Thus, many philosophers read Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” as rejecting verificationism. This is because they fail to notice an important distinction. What Quine rejects is not verificationism but “reductionism,” namely, the theory that there is, for each statement, a corresponding range of verifying conditions determinable a priori. Reductionism is inherently localist with regard to verification; whereas verificationism, as such, is neutral on whether verification is holistic. And, lastly, modern verificationism is, veil of ignorance verificationism 953   953 whereas traditional verificationism never was, connected with revisionism in the philosophy of logic and mathematics e.g., rejecting the principle of bivalence. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The taming of the true.”

verstehen G., ‘understanding’ (literally, for-standing), ‘interpretation’, a method in the human sciences that aims at reconstructing meanings from the “agent’s point of view.” Such a method makes primary how agents understand themselves, as, e.g., when cultural anthropologists try to understand symbols and practices from the “native’s point of view.” Understanding in this sense is often contrasted with explanation, or Erklärung. Whereas explanations discover causes in light of general laws and take an external perspective, understanding aims at explicating the meaning that, from an internal perspective, an action or expression has for the actor. This distinction often is the basis for a further methodological and ontological distinction between the natural and the human sciences, the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften. Whereas the data of the natural sciences may be theory-dependent and in that sense interpretive, the human sciences are “doubly” interpretive; they try to interpret the interpretations that human subjects give to their actions and practices. The human sciences do not aim at explaining events but at understanding meanings, texts, and text analogues. Actions, artifacts, and social relations are all like texts in that they have a significance for and by human subjects. The method of Verstehen thus denies the “unity of science” thesis typical of accounts of explanation given by empiricists and positivists. However, other philosophers such as Weber argue against such a dichotomy and assert that the social sciences in particular must incorporate features of both explanation and understanding, and psychoanalysis and theories of ideology unify both approaches. Even among proponents of this method, the precise nature of interpretation remains controversial. While Dilthey and other neo-Kantians proposed that Verstehen is the imaginative reexperiencing of the subjective point of view of the actor, Vitters and his following propose a sharp distinction between reasons and causes and understand reasons in terms of relating an action to the relevant rules or norms that it follows. In both cases, the aim of the human sciences is to understand what the text or text analogue really means for the agent. Following Heidegger, recent G. hermeneutics argues that Verstehen does not refer to special disciplinary techniques nor to merely cognitive and theoretical achievements, but to the practical mode of all human existence, its situatedness in a world that projects various possibilities. All understanding then becomes interpretation, itself a universal feature of all human activity, including the natural sciences. The criteria of success in Verstehen also remain disputed, particularly since many philosophers deny that it constitutes a method. If all understanding is interpretation, then there are no presuppositionless, neutral data that can put them to an empirical test. Verstehen is therefore not a method but an event, in which there is a “fusion of horizons” between text and interpreter. Whether criteria such as coherence, the capacity to engage in a tradition, or increasing dialogue apply depends on the type, purpose, and context of various interpretations. Grice: “If Austin coined a witticism, that’s ‘uptake,’ so much better than the verbose ‘understanding,’ which in Cockney means a leg!” --.

viscious regress – Grice preferred ‘vicious circle’ versus ‘virtuous circle’ – “Whether virtuous regress sounds oxymoronic” -- regress that is in some way unacceptable, where a regress is an infinite series of items each of which is in some sense dependent on a prior item of a similar sort, e.g. an infinite series of events each of which is caused by the next prior event in the series. Reasons for holding a regress to be vicious might be that it is either impossible or that its existence is inconsistent with things known to be true. The claim that something would lead to a vicious regress is often made as part of a reductio ad absurdum argument strategy. An example of this can be found in Aquinas’s argument for the existence of an uncaused cause on the ground that an infinite regress of causes is vicious. Those responding to the argument have sometimes contended that this regress is not in fact vicious and hence that the argument fails. A more convincing example of a regress is generated by the principle that one’s coming to know the meaning of a word must always be based on a prior understanding of other words. If this principle is correct, then one can know the meaning of a word w1 only on the basis of previously understanding the meanings of other words w2 and w3. But a further application of the principle yields the result that one can understand these words w2 and w3 only on the basis of understanding still other words. This leads to an infinite regress. Since no one understands any words at birth, the regress implies that no one ever comes to understand any words. But this is clearly false. Since the existence of this regress is inconsistent with an obvious truth, we may conclude that the regress is vicious and consequently that the principle that generates it is false. 

vico: cited by H. P. Grice, “Vico and the origin of language.” Philosopher who founded modern philosophy of history, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of mythology. He was born and lived all his life in or near Naples, where he taught eloquence. The Inquisition was a force in Naples throughout Vico’s lifetime. A turning point in his career was his loss of the concourse for a chair of civil law 1723. Although a disappointment and an injustice, it enabled him to produce his major philosophical work. He was appointed royal historiographer by Charles of Bourbon. Vico’s major work is “La scienza nuova”  completely revised in a second, definitive version in 1730. In the 1720s, he published three connected works in Latin on jurisprudence, under the title Universal Law; one contains a sketch of his conception of a “new science” of the historical life of nations. Vico’s principal works preceding this are On the Study Methods of Our Time 1709, comparing the ancients with the moderns regarding human education, and On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the s 1710, attacking the Cartesian conception of metaphysics. His Autobiography inaugurates the conception of modern intellectual autobiography. Basic to Vico’s philosophy is his principle that “the true is the made” “verum ipsum factum”, that what is true is convertible with what is made. This principle is central in his conception of “science” scientia, scienza. A science is possible only for those subjects in which such a conversion is possible. There can be a science of mathematics, since mathematical truths are such because we make them. Analogously, there can be a science of the civil world of the historical life of nations. Since we make the things of the civil world, it is possible for us to have a science of them. As the makers of our own world, like God as the maker who makes by knowing and knows by making, we can have knowledge per caussas through causes, from within. In the natural sciences we can have only conscientia a kind of “consciousness”, not scientia, because things in nature are not made by the knower. Vico’s “new science” is a science of the principles whereby “men make history”; it is also a demonstration of “what providence has wrought in history.” All nations rise and fall in cycles within history corsi e ricorsi in a pattern governed by providence. The world of nations or, in the Augustinian phrase Vico uses, “the great city of the human race,” exhibits a pattern of three ages of “ideal eternal history” storia ideale eterna. Every nation passes through an age of gods when people think in terms of gods, an age of heroes when all virtues and institutions are formed through the personalities of heroes, and an age of humans when all sense of the divine is lost, life becomes luxurious and false, and thought becomes abstract and ineffective; then the cycle must begin again. In the first two ages all life and thought are governed by the primordial power of “imagination” fantasia and the world is ordered through the power of humans to form experience in terms of “imaginative universals” universali fantastici. These two ages are governed by “poetic wisdom” sapienza poetica. At the basis of Vico’s conception of history, society, and knowledge is a conception of mythical thought as the origin of the human world. Fantasia is the original power of the human mind through which the true and the made are converted to create the myths and gods that are at the basis of any cycle of history. Michelet was the primary supporter of Vico’s ideas in the nineteenth century; he made them the basis of his own philosophy of history. Coleridge is the principal disseminator of Vico’s views in England. James Joyce used the New Science as a substructure for Finnegans Wake, making plays on Vico’s name, beginning with one in Latin in the first sentence: “by a commodius vicus of recirculation.” Croce revives Vico’s philosophical thought, wishing to conceive Vico as the  Hegel. Vico’s ideas have been the subject of analysis by such prominent philosophical thinkers as Horkheimer and Berlin, by anthropologists such as Edmund Leach, and by literary critics such as René Wellek and Herbert Read. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Vico alla Villa Grice.” H. P. Grice, “Vico and language.”

weiner kraus -- Vienna Circle  vide ayerism -- a group of philosophers and scientists who met periodically for discussions in Vienna from 2 to 8 and who proposed a self-consciously revolutionary conception of scientific knowledge. The Circle was initiated by the mathematician Hans Hahn to continue a prewar forum with the physicist Philip Frank and the social scientist Otto Neurath after the arrival in Vienna of Moritz Schlick, a philosopher who had studied with Max Planck. Carnap joined in 6 from 1 in Prague; other members included Herbert Feigl from 0 in Iowa, Friedrich Waismann, Bergmann, Viktor Kraft, and Bela von Juhos. Viennese associates of the Circle included Kurt Gödel, Karl Menger, Felix Kaufmann, and Edgar Zilsel. Popper was not a member or associate. During its formative period the Circle’s activities were confined to discussion meetings many on Vitters’s Tractatus. In 9 the Circle entered its public period with the formation of the Verein Ernst Mach, the publication of its manifesto Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis by Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath tr. in Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, 3, and the first of a series of philosophical monographs edited by Frank and Schlick. It also began collaboration with the independent but broadly like-minded Berlin “Society of Empirical Philosophy,” including Reichenbach, Kurt Grelling, Kurt Lewin, Friedrich Kraus, Walter Dubislav, Hempel, and Richard von Mises: the groups together organized their first public conferences in Prague and Königsberg, acquired editorship of a philosophical journal renamed Erkenntnis, and later organized the international Unity of Science congresses. The death and dispersion of key members from 4 onward Hahn died in 4, Neurath left for Holland in 4, Carnap left for the United States in 5, Schlick died in 6 did not mean the extinction of Vienna Circle philosophy. Through the subsequent work of earlier visitors Ayer, Ernest Nagel, Quine and members and collaborators who emigrated to the United States Carnap, Feigl, Frank, Hempel, and Reichenbach, the logical positivism of the Circle Reichenbach and Neurath independently preferred “logical empiricism” strongly influenced the development of analytic philosophy. The Circle’s discussions concerned the philosophy of formal and physical science, and even though their individual publications ranged much wider, it is the attitude toward science that defines the Circle within the philosophical movements of central Europe at the time. The Circle rejected the need for a specifically philosophical epistemology that bestowed justification on knowledge claims from beyond science itself. In this, the Circle may also have drawn on a distinct Austrian tradition a thesis of its historian Neurath: in most of G.y, science and philosophy had parted ways during the nineteenth century. Starting with Helmholtz, of course, there also arose a movement that sought to distinguish the scientific respectability of the Kantian tradition from the speculations of G. idealism, yet after 0 neo-Kantians insisted on the autonomy of epistemology, disparaging earlier fellow travelers as “positivist.” Yet the program of reducing the knowledge claim of science and providing legitimations to what’s left found wide favor with the more empirical-minded like Mach. Comprehensive description, not explanation, of natural phenomena became the task for theorists who no longer looked to philosophy for foundations, but found them in the utility of their preferred empirical procedures. Along with the positivists, the Vienna Circle thought uneconomical the Kantian answer to the question of the possibility of objectivity, the synthetic a priori. Moreover, the Vienna Circle and its conventionalist precursors Poincaré and Duhem saw them contradicted by the results of formal science. Riemann’s geometries showed that questions about the geometry of physical space were open to more than one answer: Was physical space Euclidean or non-Euclidean? It fell to Einstein and the pre-Circle Schlick Space and Time in Contemporary Physics, 7 to argue that relativity theory showed the untenability of Kant’s conception of space and time as forever fixed synthetic a priori forms of intuition. Yet Frege’s anti-psychologistic critique had also shown empiricism unable to account for knowledge of arithmetic and the conventionalists had ended the positivist dream of a theory of experiential elements that bridged the gap between descriptions of fact and general principles of science. How, then, could the Vienna Circle defend the claim  under attack as just one worldview among others  that science provides knowledge? The Circle confronted the problem of constitutive conventions. As befitted their self-image beyond Kant and Mach, they found their paradigmatic answer in the theory of relativity: they thought that irreducible conventions of measurement with wide-ranging implications were sharply separable from pure facts like point coincidences. Empirical theories were viewed as logical structures of statements freely created, yet accountable to experiential input via their predictive consequences identifiable by observation. The Vienna Circle defended empiricism by the reconceptualization of the relation between a priori and a posteriori inquiries. First, in a manner sympathetic to Frege’s and Russell’s doctrine of logicism and guided by Vitters’s notion of tautology, arithmetic was considered a part of logic and treated as entirely analytical, without any empirical content; its truth was held to be exhausted by what is provable from the premises and rules of a formal symbolic system. Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language, 4, assimilated Gödel’s incompleteness result by claiming that not every such proof could be demonstrated in those systems themselves which are powerful enough to represent classical arithmetic. The synthetic a priori was not needed for formal science because all of its results were non-synthetic. Second, the Circle adopted verificationism: supposedly empirical concepts whose applicability was indiscernible were excluded from science. The terms for unobservables were to be reconstructed by logical operations from the observational terms. Only if such reconstructions were provided did the more theoretical parts of science retain their empirical character. Just what kind of reduction was aimed for was not always clear and earlier radical positions were gradually weakened; Reichenbach instead considered the relation between observational and theoretical statements to be probabilistic. Empirical science needed no synthetic a priori either; all of its statements were a posteriori. Combined with the view that the analysis of the logical form of expressions allowed for the exact determination of their combinatorial value, verificationism was to exhibit the knowledge claims of science and eliminate metaphysics. Whatever meaning did not survive identification with the scientific was deemed irrelevant to knowledge claims Reichenbach did not share this view either. Since the Circle also observed the then long-discussed ban on issuing unconditional value statements in science, its metaethical positions may be broadly characterized as endorsing noncognitivism. Its members were not simply emotivists, however, holding that value judgments were mere expressions of feeling, but sought to distinguish the factual and evaluative contents of value judgments. Those who, like Schlick Questions of Ethics, 0, engaged in metaethics, distinguished the expressive component x desires y of value judgments from their implied descriptive component doing zfurthers aim y and held that the demand inherent in moral principles possessed validity if the implied description was true and the expressed desire was endorsed. This analysis of normative concepts did not render them meaningless but allowed for psychological and sociological studies of ethical systems; Menger’s formal variant Morality, Decision and Social Organization, 4 proved influential for decision theory. The semiotic view that knowledge required structured representations was developed in close contact with foundational research in mathematics and depended on the “new” logic of Frege, Russell, and Vitters, out of which quantification theory was emerging. Major new results were quickly integrated albeit controversially and Carnap’s works reflect the development of the conception of logic itself. In his Logical Syntax he adopted the “Principle of Tolerance” vis-à-vis the question of the foundation of the formal sciences: the choice of logics and languages was conventional and constrained, apart from the demand for consistency, only by pragmatic considerations. The proposed language form and its difference from alternatives simply had to be stated as exactly as possible: whether a logico-linguistic framework as a whole correctly represented reality was a cognitively meaningless question. Yet what was the status of the verifiability principle? Carnap’s suggestion that it represents not a discovery but a proposal for future scientific language use deserves to be taken seriously, for it not only characterizes his own conventionalism, but also amplifies the Circle’s linguistic turn, according to which all philosophy concerned ways of representing, rather than the nature of the represented. What the Vienna Circle “discovered” was how much of science was conventional: its verificationism was a proposal for accommodating the creativity of scientific theorizing without accommodating idealism. Whether an empirical claim in order to be meaningful needed to be actually verified or only potentially verifiable, or fallible or only potentially testable, and whether so by current or only by future means, became matters of discussion during the 0s. Equally important for the question whether the Circle’s conventionalism avoided idealism and metaphysics were the issues of the status of theoretical discourse about unobservables and the nature of science’s empirical foundation. The view suggested in Schlick’s early General Theory of Knowledge 8, 2d. ed. 5 and Frank’s The Causal Law and its Limitations 2 and elaborated in Carnap’s “Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science” in Foundations of the Unity of Science I.1, 8 characterized the theoretical language as an uninterpreted calculus that is related to the fully interpreted observational language only by partial definitions. Did such an instrumentalism require for its empirical anchor the sharp separation of observational from theoretical terms? Could such a separation even be maintained? Consider the unity of science thesis. According to the methodological version, endorsed by all members, all of science abides by the same criteria: no basic methodological differences separate the natural from the social or cultural sciences Geisteswissenschaften as claimed by those who distinguish between ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’. According to the metalinguistic version, all objects of scientific knowledge could in principle be comprehended by the same “universal” language. Physicalism asserts that this is the language that speaks of physical objects. While everybody in the Circle endorsed physicalism in this sense, the understanding of its importance varied, as became clear in the socalled protocol sentence debate. The nomological version of the unity thesis was only later clearly distinguished: whether all scientific laws could be reduced to those of physics was another matter on which Neurath came to differ. Ostensively, this debate concerned the question of the form, content, and epistemological status of scientific evidence statements. Schlick’s unrevisable “affirmations” talked about phenomenal states in statements not themselves part of the language of science “The Foundation of Knowledge,” 4, tr. in Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism. Carnap’s preference changed from unrevisable statements in a primitive methodologically solipsistic protocol language that were fallibly translatable into the physicalistic system language 1; see Unity of Science, 4, via arbitrary revisable statements of that system language that are taken as temporary resting points in testing 2, to revisable statements in the scientific observation language 5; see “Testability and Meaning,” Philosophy of Science, 637. These changes were partly prompted by Neurath, whose own revisable “protocol statements” spoke, amongst other matters, of the relation between observers and the observed in a “universal slang” that mixed expressions of the physicalistically cleansed colloquial and the high scientific languages “Protocol Statements,”  tr. in Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism. Ultimately, these proposals answered to different projects. Since all agreed that all statements of science were hypothetical, the questions of their “foundation” concerned rather the very nature of Vienna Circle philosophy. For Schlick philosophy became the activity of meaning determination inspired by Vitters; Carnap pursued it as the rational reconstruction of knowledge claims concerned only with what Reichenbach called the “context of justification” its logical aspects, not the “context of discovery”; and Neurath replaced philosophy altogether with a naturalistic, interdisciplinary, empirical inquiry into science as a distinctive discursive practice, precluding the orthodox conception of the unity of science. The Vienna Circle was neither a monolithic nor a necessarily reductionist philosophical movement, and quick assimilation to the tradition of British empiricism mistakes its struggles with the formcontent dichotomy for foundationalism, when instead sophisticated responses to the question of the presuppositions of their own theories of knowledge were being developed. In its time and place, the Circle was a minority voice; the sociopolitical dimension of its theories  stressed more by some Neurath than others Schlick  as a renewal of Enlightenment thought, ultimately against the rising tide of Blutund-Boden metaphysics, is gaining recognition. After the celebrated “death” of reductionist logical positivism in the 0s the historical Vienna Circle is reemerging as a multifaceted object of the history of analytical philosophy itself, revealing in nuce different strands of reasoning still significant for postpositivist theory of science. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “What Freddie brought us from Vienna.”

vio: essential Italian philosopher. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Grice e de Vio.” The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

violence: Grice: “I would define ‘violence’ as the use of force to cause physical harm, death, or destruction physical violence;  the causing of severe mental or emotional harm, as through humiliation, deprivation, or brainwashing, whether using force or not psychological violence; more broadly, profaning, desecrating, defiling, or showing disrespect for i.e., “doing violence” to something valued, sacred, or cherished; extreme physical force in the natural world, as in tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Physical violence may be directed against persons, animals, or property.” Grice goes on: “In the first two cases, harm, pain, suffering, and death figure prominently; in the third, illegality or illegitimacy the forceful destruction of property is typically considered violence when it lacks authorization. Psychological violence applies principally to persons. It may be understood as the violation of beings worthy of respect. But it can apply to higher animals as well as in the damaging mental effects of some experimentation, e.g., involving isolation and deprivation. Environmentalists sometimes speak of violence against the environment, implying both destruction and disrespect for the natural world. Sometimes the concept of violence is used to characterize acts or practices of which one morally disapproves. To this extent it has a normative force. But this prejudges whether violence is wrong. One may, on the other hand, regard inflicting harm or death as only prima facie wrong i.e., wrong all other things being equal. This gives violence a normative character, establishing its prima facie wrongness. But it leaves open the ultimate moral justifiability of its use. Established practices of physical or psychological violence  e.g., war, capital punishment  constitute institutionalized violence. So do illegal or extralegal practices like vigilantism, torture, and state terrorism e.g., death squads. Anarchists sometimes regard the courts, prisons, and police essential to maintaining the state as violence. Racism and sexism may be considered institutional violence owing to their associated psychological as well as physical violence. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Causes and reasons.” 

virtuosum – Grice: “The etymology of ‘virtue’ is fantastic: it is strictly a bit like ‘manliness,’ only the Romans were never sure who was ‘vir’ and who wasn’t!” -- “virtue is entire” – “Do not multiply virtues beyond necessity” -- virtue ethics, also called virtue-based ethics and agent-based ethics, conceptions or theories of morality in which virtues play a central or independent role. Thus, it is more than simply the account of the virtues offered by a given theory. Some take the principal claim of virtue ethics to be about the moral subject  that, in living her life, she should focus her attention on the cultivation of her or others’ virtues. Others take the principal claim to be about the moral theorist  that, in mapping the structure of our moral thought, she should concentrate on the virtues. This latter view can be construed weakly as holding that the moral virtues are no less basic than other moral concepts. In this type of virtue ethics, virtues are independent of other moral concepts in that claims about morally virtuous character or action are, in the main, neither reducible to nor justified on the basis of underlying claims about moral duty or rights, or about what is impersonally valuable. It can also be construed strongly as holding that the moral virtues are more basic than other moral concepts. In such a virtue ethics, virtues are fundamental, i.e., claims about other moral concepts are either reducible to underlying claims about moral virtues or justified on their basis. Forms of virtue ethics predominated in Western philosophy before the Renaissance, most notably in Aristotle, but also in Plato and Aquinas. Several ancient and medieval philosophers endorsed strong versions of virtue ethics. These views focused on character rather than on discrete behavior, identifying illicit behavior with vicious behavior, i.e., conduct that would be seriously out of character for a virtuous person. A virtuous person, in turn, was defined as one with dispositions relevantly linked to human flourishing. On these views, while a person of good character, or someone who carefully observes her, may be able to articulate certain principles or rules by which she guides her conduct or to which, at least, it outwardly conforms, the principles are not an ultimate source of moral justification. On the contrary, they are justified only insofar as the conduct they endorse would be in character for a virtuous person. For Aristotle, the connection between flourishing and virtue seems conceptual. He conceived moral virtues as dispositions to choose under the proper guidance of reason, and defined a flourishing life as one lived in accordance with these virtues. While most accounts of the virtues link them to the flourishing of the virtuous person, there are other possibilities. In principle, the flourishing to which virtue is tied whether causally or conceptually may be either that of the virtuous subject herself, or that of some patient who is a recipient of her virtuous behavior, or that of some larger affected group  the agent’s community, perhaps, or all humanity, or even sentient life in general. For the philosophers of ancient Greece, it was human nature, usually conceived teleologically, that fixed the content of this flourishing. Medieval Christian writers reinterpreted this, stipulating both that the flourishing life to which the virtues lead extends past death, and that human flourishing is not merely the fulfillment of capacities and tendencies inherent in human nature, but is the realization of a divine plan. In late twentieth-century versions of virtue ethics, some theorists have suggested that it is neither to a teleology inherent in human nature nor to the divine will that we should look in determining the content of that flourishing to which the virtues lead. They understand flourishing more as a matter of a person’s living a life that meets the standards of her cultural, historical tradition. In his most general characterization, Aristotle called a thing’s virtues those features of it that made it and its operation good. The moral virtues were what made people live well. This use of ‘making’ is ambiguous. Where he and other premodern thinkers thought the connection between virtues and living well to be conceptual, moral theorists of the modernist era have usually virtue ethics virtue ethics understood it causally. They commonly maintain that a virtue is a character trait that disposes a person to do what can be independently identified as morally required or to effect what is best best for herself, according to some theories; best for others, according to different ones. Benjamin Franklin, e.g., deemed it virtuous for a person to be frugal, because he thought frugality was likely to result in her having a less troubled life. On views of this sort, a lively concern for the welfare of others has moral importance only inasmuch as it tends to motivate people actually to perform helpful actions. In short, benevolence is a virtue because it conduces to beneficent conduct; veracity, because it conduces to truth telling; fidelity, because it conduces to promise keeping; and so on. Reacting to this aspect of modernist philosophy, recent proponents of virtue ethics deny that moral virtues derive from prior determinations of what actions are right or of what states of affairs are best. Some, especially certain theorists of liberalism, assign virtues to what they see as one compartment of moral thought and duties to a separate, and only loosely connected compartment. For them, the life and theory of virtue is autonomous. They hold that virtues and duties have independent sources of justification, with virtues chiefly concerned with the individual’s personal “ideals,” self-image, or conception of her life goals, while duties and rights are thought to derive from social rules regulating interpersonal dealings. Proponents of virtue ethics maintain that it has certain advantages over more modern alternatives. They argue that virtue ethics is properly concrete, because it grounds morality in facts about human nature or about the concrete development of particular cultural traditions, in contrast with modernist attempts to ground morality in subjective preference or in abstract principles of reason. They also claim that virtue ethics is truer to human psychology in concentrating on the less conscious aspects of motivation  on relatively stable dispositions, habits, and long-term goals, for example  where modern ethics focuses on decision making directed by principles and rules. Virtue ethics, some say, offers a more unified and comprehensive conception of moral life, one that extends beyond actions to comprise wants, goals, likes and dislikes, and, in general, what sort of person one is and aims to be. Proponents of virtue ethics also contend that, without the sensitivity and appreciation of their situation and its opportunities that only virtues consistently make available, agents cannot properly apply the rules that modernist ethical theories offer to guide their actions. Nor, in their view, will the agent follow those rules unless her virtues offer her sufficient clarity of purpose and perseverance against temptation. Several objections have been raised against virtue ethics in its most recent forms. Critics contend that it is antiquarian, because it relies on conceptions of human nature whose teleology renders them obsolete; circular, because it allegedly defines right action in terms of virtues while defining virtues in terms of right action; arbitrary and irrelevant to modern society, since there is today no accepted standard either of what constitutes human flourishing or of which dispositions lead to it; of no practical use, because it offers no guidance when virtues seem to conflict; egoistic, in that it ultimately directs the subject’s moral attention to herself rather than to others; and fatalistic, in allowing the morality of one’s behavior to hinge finally on luck in one’s constitution, upbringing, and opportunities. There may be versions of virtue ethics that escape the force of all or most of the objections, but not every form of virtue ethics can claim for itself all the advantages mentioned above.  virtue epistemology, the subfield of epistemology that takes epistemic virtue to be central to understanding justification or knowledge or both. An epistemic virtue is a personal quality conducive to the discovery of truth, the avoidance of error, or some other intellectually valuable goal. Following Aristotle, we should distinguish these virtues from such qualities as wisdom or good judgment, which are the intellectual basis of practical  but not necessarily intellectual  success. The importance, and to an extent, the very definition, of this notion depends, however, on larger issues of epistemology. For those who favor a naturalist conception of knowledge say, as belief formed in a “reliable” way, there is reason to call any truth-conducive quality or properly working cognitive mechanism an epistemic virtue. There is no particular reason to limit the epistemic virtues to recognizable personal qualities: a high mathematical aptitude may count as an epistemic virtue. For those who favor a more “normative” conception of knowledge, the corresponding notion of an epistemic virtue or vice will be narrower: it will be tied to personal qualities like impartiality or carelessness whose exercise one would associate with an ethics of belief. H. P. Grice, “Philosophy, like virtue, is entire;” H. P. Grice, “Virtutes non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,” H. P. Grice, “Aristotle’s mesotes – where virtue lies.”

vital lie: Grice: “I would define a vital life as an instance of self-deception or lying to oneself when it fosters hope, confidence, self-esteem, mental health, or creativity; or any false belief or unjustified attitude that helps people cope with difficulties; or  a lie to other people designed to promote their wellbeing; e.. g.: self-deceiving optimism about one’s prospects for success in work or personal relationships may generate hope, mobilize energy, enrich life’s meaning, and increase chances for success. Grice considers the optimism law as basic in folk-psychology. Ibsen dramatises “life-lies” as essential for happiness The Wild Duck, and O’Neill portrays “pipe dreams” as necessary crutches The Iceman Cometh. Nietzsche endorsed “pious illusions” or “holy fictions” about the past that liberate individuals and societies from shame and guilt On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. In Problems of belief, Schiller praised normal degrees of vanity and self-conceit because they support selfesteem. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Optimism,” in “Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre.”

vitoria: dominican jurist, political philosopher, and theologian who is regarded as the founder of modern international law. Born in Vitoria or Burgos, he studied and taught at the  of SaintJacques in Paris, where he met Erasmus and Vives. He also taught at the  of San Gregorio in Valladolid and at Salamanca. His most famous works are the notes relectiones for twelve public addresses he delivered at Salamanca, published posthumously in 1557. Two relectiones stand out: De Indis and De jure belli. They were responses to the legal and political issues raised by the discovery and colonization of America. In contrast with Mariana’s contract Arianism, Vitoria held that political society is our natural state. The aim of the state is to promote the common good and preserve the rights of citizens. Citizenship is the result of birthplace jus solis rather than blood jus sanguini. The authority of the state resides in the body politic but is transferred to rulers for its proper exercise. The best form of government is monarchy because it preserves the unity necessary for social action while safeguarding individual freedoms. Apart from the societies of individual states, humans belong to an international society. This society has its own authority and laws that establish the rights and duties of the states. These laws constitute the law of nations jus gentium.

vives: attended the  of Paris and lived most of his life in Flanders. With his friend Erasmus he prepared a widely used commentary of Augustine’s De civitate Dei. From 1523 to 1528 Vives visited England, taught at Oxford, befriended More, and became Catherine of Aragon’s confidant. While in Paris, Vives repudiated medieval logic as useless Adversus pseudodialecticos, 1520 and proposed instead a dialectic emphasizing resourceful reasoning and clear and persuasive exposition De tradendis disciplinis.  His method was partially inspired by Rudolph Agricola and probably influential upon Peter Ramus. Less interested in theology than Erasmus or More, he surpassed both in philosophical depth. As one of the great pedagogues of his age, Vives proposed a plan of education that substituted the Aristotelian ideal of speculative certainty for a pragmatic probability capable of guiding action. Vives enlarged the scope of women’s education De institutione feminae Christianae, 1524 and contributed to the teaching of classical Latin Exercitatio linguae latinae, 1538. A champion of EuroVisistadvaita Vedanta Vives, Juan Luis 962   962 pean unity against the Turks, he professed the belief that international order De concordia, 1526 depended upon the control of passion De anima et vita, 1538. As a social reformer, Vives pioneered the secularization of welfare De subventione pauperum, 1526 and opposed the abuse of legal jargon Aedes legum, 1520. Although his Jewish parents were victimized by the Inquisition, Vives remained a Catholic and managed to write an apology of Christianity without taking sides in controversial theological matters De veritate fidei.

volition: cf. desideratum. a mental event involved with the initiation of action. ‘To will’ is sometimes taken to be the corresponding verb form of ‘volition’. The concept of volition is rooted in modern philosophy; contemporary philosophers have transformed it by identifying volitions with ordinary mental events, such as intentions, or beliefs plus desires. Volitions, especially in contemporary guises, are often taken to be complex mental events consisting of cognitive, affective, and conative elements. The conative element is the impetus  the underlying motivation  for the action. A velleity is a conative element insufficient by itself to initiate action. The will is a faculty, or set of abilities, that yields the mental events involved in initiating action. There are three primary theories about the role of volitions in action. The first is a reductive account in which action is identified with the entire causal sequence of the mental event the volition causing the bodily behavior. J. S. Mill, for example, says: “Now what is action? Not one thing, but a series of two things: the state of mind called a volition, followed by an effect. . . . [T]he two together constitute the action” Logic. Mary’s raising her arm is Mary’s mental state causing her arm to rise. Neither Mary’s volitional state nor her arm’s rising are themselves actions; rather, the entire causal sequence the “causing” is the action. The primary difficulty for this account is maintaining its reductive status. There is no way to delineate volition and the resultant bodily behavior without referring to action. There are two non-reductive accounts, one that identifies the action with the initiating volition and another that identifies the action with the effect of the volition. In the former, a volition is the action, and bodily movements are mere causal consequences. Berkeley advocates this view: “The Mind . . . is to be accounted active in . . . so far forth as volition is included. . . . In plucking this flower I am active, because I do it by the motion of my hand, which was consequent upon my volition” Three Dialogues. In this century, Prichard is associated with this theory: “to act is really to will something” Moral Obligation, 9, where willing is sui generis though at other places Prichard equates willing with the action of mentally setting oneself to do something. In this sense, a volition is an act of will. This account has come under attack by Ryle Concept of Mind. Ryle argues that it leads to a vicious regress, in that to will to do something, one must will to will to do it, and so on. It has been countered that the regress collapses; there is nothing beyond willing that one must do in order to will. Another criticism of Ryle’s, which is more telling, is that ‘volition’ is an obscurantic term of art; “[volition] is an artificial concept. We have to study certain specialist theories in order to find out how it is to be manipulated. . . . [It is like] ‘phlogiston’ and ‘animal spirits’ . . . [which] have now no utility” Concept of Mind. Another approach, the causal theory of action, identifies an action with the causal consequences of volition. Locke, e.g., says: “Volition or willing is an act of the mind directing its thought to the production of any action, and thereby exerting its power to produce it. . . . [V]olition is nothing but that particular determination of the mind, whereby . . . the mind endeavors to give rise, continuation, or stop, to any action which it takes to be in its power” Essay concerning Human Understanding. This is a functional account, since an event is an action in virtue of its causal role. Mary’s arm rising is Mary’s action of raising her arm in virtue of being caused by her willing to raise it. If her arm’s rising had been caused by a nervous twitch, it would not be action, even if the bodily movements were photographically the same. In response to Ryle’s charge of obscurantism, contemporary causal theorists tend to identify volitions with ordinary mental events. For example, Davidson takes the cause of actions to be beliefs plus desires and Wilfrid Sellars takes volitions to be intentions to do something here and now. Despite its plausibility, however, the causal theory faces two difficult problems: the first is purported counterexamples based on wayward causal chains connecting the antecedent mental event and the bodily movements; the second is provision of an enlightening account of these mental events, e.g. intending, that does justice to the conative element. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “A. J. P. Kenny on voliting.”

arouet -- voltaire: pen name of François-Marie Arouet -- philosopher and writer who won early fame as a playwright and poet and later was an influential popularizer of Newtonian natural philosophy. His enduring reputation rests on his acerbically witty essays on religious and moral topics especially the Philosophical Letters, and the Dictionaire Philosophique, his brilliant stories, and his passionate polemics against the injustices of the ancien régime. In Whitehead’s phrase, he was more “a philosophe than a philosopher” in the current specialized disciplinary sense. He borrowed most of his views on metaphysics and epistemology from Locke, whose work, along with Newton’s, he came to know and extravagantly admire during his stay 172628 in England. His is best placed in the line of great  literary moralists that includes Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, and Camus. Voltaire’s position is skeptical, empirical, and humanistic. His skepticism is not of the radical sort that concerned Descartes. But he denies that we can find adequate support for the grand metaphysical claims of systematic philosophers, such as Leibniz, or for the dogmatic theology of institutional religions. Voltaire’s empiricism urges us to be content with the limited and fallible knowledge of our everyday experience and its development through the methods of empirical science. His humanism makes a plea, based on his empiricist skepticism, for religious and social tolerance: none of us can know enough to be justified in persecuting those who disagree with us on fundamental philosophical and theological matters. Voltaire’s positive view is that our human condition, for all its flaws and perils, is meaningful and livable strictly in its own terms, quite apart from any connection to the threats and promises of dubious transcendental realms. Voltaire’s position is well illustrated by his views on religion. Although complex doctrines about the Trinity or the Incarnation strike him as gratuitous nonsense, he nonetheless is firmly convinced of the reality of a good God who enjoins us through our moral sense to love one another as brothers and sisters. Indeed, it is precisely this moral sense that he finds outraged by the intolerance of institutional Christianity. His deepest religious thinking concerns the problem of evil, which he treated in his “Poem of the Lisbon Earthquake” and the classic tales Zadig 1747 and Candide 1759. He rejects the Panglossian view held by Candide’s Dr. Pangloss, a caricature of Leibniz that we can see the hand of providence in our daily life but is prepared to acknowledge that an all-good God does not as an extreme deism would hold let his universe just blindly run. Whatever metaphysical truth there may be in the thought that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” Voltaire insists that this idea is ludicrous as a practical response to evil and recommends instead concrete action to solve specific local problems: “We must cultivate our garden.” Voltaire was and remains an immensely controversial figure. Will Durant regarded him as “the greatest man who ever lived,” while Joseph de Maistre maintained that “admiration for Voltaire is an infallible sign of a corrupt soul.” Perhaps it is enough to say that he wrote with unequaled charm and wit and stood for values that are essential to, if perhaps not the very core of, our humanity. Grice: “I love his “Philosophical Dictionary,” – it’s in alphabetical order, too!” --.

voluntarism: -- W. James: “I will that the chair slides over the floor toward me. It doesn’t.” cf. Grice on the volitive – desiderative -- any philosophical view that makes our ability to control the phenomena in question an essential part of the correct understanding of those phenomena. Thus, ethical voluntarism is the doctrine that the standards that define right and wrong conduct are in some sense chosen by us. Doxastic voluntarism is the doctrine that we have extensive control over what we believe; we choose what to believe. A special case of doxastic voluntarism is theological voluntarism, which implies that religious belief requires a substantial element of choice; the evidence alone cannot decide the issue. This is a view that is closely associated with Pascal, Kierkegaard, and James. Historical voluntarism is the doctrine that the human will is a major factor in history. Such views contrast with Marxist views of history. Metaphysical voluntarism is the doctrine, linked with Schopenhauer, that the fundamental organizing principle of the world is not the incarnation of a rational or a moral order but rather the will, which for Schopenhauer is an ultimately meaningless striving for survival, to be found in all of nature.  Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The will”

neumann: J. philosopher. Born in Budapest and trained in Hungary, Switzerland, and Germany, he visited Princeton   and became a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study – Grice: “They offered first a post at the Institute of Unadvanced Study, but he declined it.” -- His most outstanding work in pure mathematics was on rings of operators in Hilbert spaces. In quantum mechanics he showed the equivalence of matrix mechanics to wave mechanics, and argued that quantum mechanics could not be embedded in an underlying deterministic system. He established important results in set theory and mathematical logic, and worked on Hilbert’s Program to prove the consistency of mathematics within mathematics until he was shocked by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. He established the mathematical theory of games and later showed its application to economics. In these many different areas, von Neumann demonstrated a remarkable ability to analyze a subject matter and develop a mathematical formalism that answered basic questions about that subject matter; formalization in logic is the special case of this process where the subject matter is language and reasoning. With the advent of World War II von Neumann turned his great analytical ability to more applied areas of hydrodynamics, ballistics, and nuclear explosives. In 5 he began to work on the design, use, and theory of electronic computers. He later became a leading scientist in government. Von Neumann contributed to the hardware architecture of the modern electronic computer, and he invented the first modern program language. A program in this language could change the addresses of its own instructions, so that it became possible to use the same subroutine on different data structures and to write programs to process programs. Von Neumann proposed to use a computer as a research tool for exploring very complex phenomena, such as the discontinuous nature of shock waves. He began the development of a theory of automata that would cover computing, communication, and control systems, as well as natural organisms, biological evolution, and societies. To this end, he initiated the study of probabilistic automata and of selfreproducing and cellular automata. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Seminar at the Institude for Advanced Study,” – “The Advanced Study of the Implicaturum,” lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

wright: G. H., Finnish philosopher, one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. His early work, influenced by logical empiricism, is on logic, probability, and induction, including contributions in modal and deontic logic, the logic of norms and action, preference logic, tense logic, causality, and determinism. In the 0s his ideas about the explanation of action helped to link the analytic tradition to Continental hermeneutics. His most important contribution is A Treatise on Induction and Probability 1, which develops a system of eliminative induction using the concepts of necessary and sufficient condition. In 9 von Wright went to Cambridge to meet Broad, and he attended Vitters’s lectures. Regular discussions with Moore also had an impact on him. In 8 von Wright succeeded Vitters as professor at Cambridge . After Vitters’s death in 1, von Wright returned to Helsinki. Together with Anscombe and Rush Rhees, he became executor and editor of Vitters’s Nachlass. The study, organization, systematization, and publication of this exceptionally rich work became a lifelong task for him. In his Cambridge years von Wright became interested in the logical properties of various modalities: alethic, deontic, epistemic. An Essay in Modal Logic 1 studies, syntactically, various deductive systems of modal logic. That year he published his famous article “Deontic Logic” in Mind. It made him the founder of modern deontic logic. These logical works profoundly influenced analytic philosophy, especially action theory. Von Wright distinguishes technical oughts means-ends relationships from norms issued by a norm-authority. His Norm and Action 3 discusses philosophical problems concerning the existence of norms and the truth of normative statements. His main work on metaethics is The Varieties of Goodness 3. In Explanation and Understanding 1 he turned to philosophical problems concerning the human sciences. He defends a manipulation view of causality, where the concept of action is basic for that of cause: human action cannot be explained causally by laws, but must be understood intentionally. The basic model of intentionality is the practical syllogism, which explains action by a logical connection with wants and beliefs. This work, sometimes characterized as anti-positivist analytical hermeneutics, bridges analytic and Continental philosophy. His studies in truth, knowledge, modality, lawlikeness, causality, determinism, norms, and practical inference were published in 384 in his Philosophical Papers. von Neumann, John von Wright, G. H. 965   965 In 1 von Wright became a member of the Academy of Finland, the highest honor Finland gives to its scientists. Over many years he has written, in Swedish and Finnish, eloquent essays in the history of ideas and the philosophy of culture. He has become increasingly critical of the modern scientific-technological civilization, its narrowly instrumental concept of rationality, and its myth of progress. His public pleas for peace, human rights, and a more harmonious coexistence of human beings and nature have made him the most esteemed intellectual in the Scandinavian countries. Refs.: H. P. Grice’s “von Wright’s ‘alethic’ and why I need it;” H. P. Grice, “von Wright on the eight state-of-affair connectors;” H. P. Grice, “von Wright and the sorry story of deontic logic.”

voting paradox: the possibility that if there are three candidates, A, B, and C, for democratic choice, with at least three choosers, and the choosers are asked to make sequential choices among pairs of candidates, A could defeat B by a majority vote, B could defeat C, and C could defeat A. This would be the outcome if the choosers’ preferences were ABC, BCA, and CAB. Hence, although each individual voter may have a clear preference ordering over the candidates, the collective may have cyclic preferences, so that individual and majoritarian collective preference orderings are not analogous. While this fact is not a logical paradox, it is perplexing to many analysts of social choice. It may also be morally perplexing in that it suggests majority rule can be quite capricious. For example, suppose we vote sequentially over various pairs of candidates, with the winner at each step facing a new candidate. If the candidates are favored by cyclic majorities, the last candidate to enter the fray will win the final vote. Hence, control over the sequence of votes may determine the outcome. It is easy to find cyclic preferences over such candidates as movies and other matters of taste. Hence, the problem of the voting paradox is clearly real and not merely a logical contrivance. But is it important? Institutions may block the generation of evidence for cyclic majorities by making choices pairwise and sequentially, as above. And some issues over which we vote provoke preference patterns that cannot produce cycles. For example, if our issue is one of unidimensional liberalism versus conservatism on some major political issue such as welfare programs, there may be no one who would prefer to spend both more and less money than what is spent in the status quo. Hence, everyone may display single-peaked preferences with preferences falling as we move in either direction toward more money or toward less from the peak. If all important issues and combinations of issues had this preference structure, the voting paradox would be unimportant. It is widely supposed by many public choice scholars that collective preferences are not single-peaked for many issues or, therefore, for combinations of issues. Hence, collective choices may be quite chaotic. What order they display may result from institutional manipulation. If this is correct, we may wonder whether democracy in the sense of the sovereignty of the electorate is a coherent notion. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Grice’s Book of Paradoxes – with pictures and illustrations.”

ward: j. English philosopher and psychologist. Influenced by Lotze, Herbart, and Brentano, Ward sharply criticized Bain’s associationism and its allied nineteenth-century reductive naturalism. His psychology rejected the associationists’ sensationism, which regarded mind as passive, capable only of sensory receptivity and composed solely of cognitive presentations. Ward emphasized the mind’s inherent activity, asserting, like Kant, the prior existence of an inferred but necessarily existing ego or subject capable of feeling and, most importantly, of conation, shaping both experience and behavior by the willful exercise of attention. Ward’s psychology stresses attention and will. In his metaphysics, Ward resisted the naturalists’ mechanistic materialism, proposing instead a teleological spiritualistic monism. While his criticisms of associationism and naturalism were telling, Ward was a transitional figure whose positive influence is limited, if we except H. P. Grice who follows him to a T. Although sympathetic to scientific psychology – he founded scientific psychology in Britain by establishing a psychology laboratory  – he, with his student Stout, represented the beginning of armchair psychology at Oxford, which Grice adored. Through Stout he influenced the hormic psychology of McDougall, and Grice who calls himself a Stoutian (“until Prichard converted me”). Ward’s major work is “Psychology” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., 1886), reworked as Psychological Principles (1918). See also ASSOCIATIONISM, JAMES, KANT.

allegedly ‘wayward’ causal chain: Grice: “What is the antonym of ‘wayward’?” -- a causal chain, referred to in a proposed causal analysis of a key concept, that goes awry. Causal analyses have been proposed for key concepts – e.g., reference, action, explanation, knowledge, artwork. There are two main cases of wayward (or deviant) causal chains that defeat a causal analysis: (1) those in which the prescribed causal route is followed, but the expected event does not occur; and (2) those in which the expected event occurs, but the prescribed causal route is not followed. Consider action. One proposed analysis is that a person’s doing something is an action if and only if what he does is caused by his beliefs and desires. The possibility of wayward causal chains defeats this analysis. For case (1), suppose, while climbing, John finds he is supporting another man on a rope. John wants to rid himself of this danger, and he believes that he can do so by loosening his grip. His belief and desire unnerve him, causing him to loosen his hold. The prescribed causal route was followed, but the ensuing event, his grip loosening, is not an action. For case (2), suppose Harry wants to kill his rich uncle, and he believes that he can find him at home. His beliefs and desires so agitate him that he drives recklessly. He hits and kills a pedestrian, who, by chance, is his uncle. The killing occurs, but without following the prescribed causal route; the killing was an accidental consequence of what Harry did. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Aetiologica: from Roman ‘cause’ to Anglo-Saxon ‘for’” – Woodfield, “Be-*cause* she thought he had insulted him.’”

warnock: “One of my most intelligent collaborators.” Unlike any other of the collaborators, Warnock had what Grice calls “the gift for botanising.” They would spend hours on the philosophy of perception. His other English collaborators were, in alphabetic order: Pears, Strawson, and Thomson. And you can see the difference. Thomson was pretty obscure. Pears was a closet Vittersian. And Strawson was ‘to the point.’ With Warnock, Grice could ramble at ease. Warnock became the custodian of Austin’s heritage which somehow annoyed Grice. But the Warnock that Grice enjoyed most was the Warnock-while-the-SchoolMaster-Austin-was-around. Because they could play. And NOT in the play group, which was “anything but.” But Grice would philosophise on ‘perception,’ and especially ‘see’ – with Warnock. Their idiolects differed. Warnock, being Irish, was more creative, and less conservative. So it was good for Warnock to have Grice to harness him! Through Warnock, Grice got to discuss a few things with Urmson, the co-custodian of Austin’s legacy. But again, most of the discussions with Urmson were before Austin’s demise. Urmson and Warnock are the co-editors of Austin’s “Philosophical Papers.” Would Austin have accepted? Who knows. The essays were more or less easily available. Still.

Warnockianism: Grice: “I told Warnock, ‘How clever language is!” “He agreed, for we realised that language makes all the distinctions you need, and when you feel there is one missing, language allows you to introduce it!” --. Refs.: H. P. Grice and G. J. Warnock, The philosophy of perception – Folder – BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, The University of California, Berkeley.

weapon: Grice’s shining new tool. The funny thing is that his tutee Strawson didn’t allow him to play with it ONCE! Or weapon. Grice refers to the implicaturum as a philosopher’s tool, and that the fun comes in the application. Strawson and Wiggins p. 522, reminds us of Austin. Austin used to say that when a philosopher “forges a new weapon, he is also fshioning new skids to put under his feet.” It is perhaps inappropriate that a memorial should mention this, but here they were, the memorialists. They were suggesting that Grice forged a shining new tool, the implicaturum, or implicaturum – rather, he proposed a rational explanation for the distinction between what an emissor means (e. g., that p) and what anything else may be said, ‘metabolically,’ to “mean.” Suggesting an analogy with J. L. Austin and his infelicitious notion of infelicity, which found him fashioning a shining new skid, the memorialists suggest the same for Grice – but of course the analogy does not apply.

what the eye no longer sees the heart no longer grieves for. Grice. Vide sytactics. Grice played with ‘elimination rules’ for his scope device. Once applied, Grice said: “What the eye no longer sees the heart no longer grieves for.” “As they say,” he added.

whistle. If you can’t say it you can’t whistle it either – But you can implicate it. “To say” takes a ‘that’-clause. “To implicate” takes a ‘that’-clause. Grice: “ ‘To whisle’ takes a ‘that’-clause, “By whistling, E communicates that he intends his emissee to be there.” “Whistle and I’ll be there” – Houseman to a Shropshire farmer.

willkür, v.  Hobson’s choice. Grice: “‘will-kuer’ is a fascinating German expression, literally will-care’.”

wilson – this is the way to quote J. C. Wilson. Grice loved him, and thanked Farquarhson for editing his papers.

wilson’s ultimate counterexample to Grice -- Grice’s counterexample – “the ultimate counter-example” -- counterinstance, also called counterexample. 1 A particular instance of an argument form that has all true premises but a false conclusion, thereby showing that the form is not universally valid. The argument form ‘p 7 q, - p / , ~q’, for example, is shown to be invalid by the counterinstance ‘Grass is either red or green; Grass is not red; Therefore, grass is not green’. 2 A particular false instance of a statement form, which demonstrates that the form is not a logical truth. A counterinstance to the form ‘p 7 q / p’, for example, would be the statement ‘If grass is either red or green, then grass is red’. 3 A particular example that demonstrates that a universal generalization is false. The universal statement ‘All large cities in the United States are east of the Mississippi’ is shown to be false by the counterinstance of San Francisco, which is a large city in the United States that is not east of the Mississippi. V.K. counterpart theory, a theory that analyzes statements about what is possible and impossible for individuals statements of de re modality in terms of what holds of counterparts of those individuals in other possible worlds, a thing’s counterparts being individuals that resemble it without being identical with it. The name ‘counterpart theory’ was coined by David Lewis, the theory’s principal exponent. Whereas some theories analyze ‘Mrs. Simpson might have been queen of England’ as ‘In some possible world, Mrs. Simpson is queen of England’, counterpart theory analyzes it as ‘In some possible world, a counterpart of Mrs. Simpson is queen of a counterpart of England’. The chief motivation for counterpart theory is a combination of two views: a de re modality should be given a possible worlds analysis, and b each actual individual exists only in the actual world, and hence cannot exist with different properties in other possible worlds. Counterpart theory provides an analysis that allows ‘Mrs. Simpson might have been queen’ to be true compatibly with a and b. For Mrs. Simpson’s counterparts in other possible worlds, in those worlds where she herself does not exist, may have regal properties that the actual Mrs. Simpson lacks. Counterpart theory is perhaps prefigured in Leibniz’s theory of possibility. 

winchism: After P. Winch, P. London-born philosopher. He quotes  Grice in a Royal Philosophy talk: “Grice’s point is that we should distinguish the truth of one’s remark form the point of one’s remarks – Grice’s example is: “Surely I have neither any doubt nor any desire to deny that the pillar box in front of me is red, and yet I won’t hesitate to say that it seems red to me” – Surely pointless, but an incredible truth meant to refute G. A. Paul!” Winch translated Vitters’s “little essay on value” which Grice “did not use for [his] essay on the conception of value.” (“Kultur und Wert.”). Grice: “Not contented with natural science, Winch wants a social one!”

wisdom: see metaphysical wisdom.

wodeham: Oxonian philosopher, like Grice. Adam de (c. 1295–1358), English Franciscan philosopher- who lectured on Peter Lombard’s Sentences at Oxford. His oeuvre includes a “Tractatus de indivisibilibus, divisum in cinque partibus”; his “Lectura secunda”  and “Lecturae Oxonienses” as transcribed by Henry Totting of Oyta, and published by John Major. Wodeham’s main work, like Grice’s, the Oxford lectures, themselves remain only partially published. A brilliant interpreter of Duns Scotus, whose original manuscripts he consulted in his main unpublication, Wodeham deems Duns Scotus the greatest Franciscan doctor. Occam, Wodeham’s teacher, is the other great influence on Wodeham (“I treasure the razor he gave me for my birthday.”) Wodeham defends his tutor Ockham’s views against attacks mounted by Walter Chatton. Grice was familiar with Wodeham (“from Wodeham, as it happens”) because he wrote the prologue to Ockham’s Summa logicae. Wodeham’s own influence rivals that of Ockham. Among the authors he strongly influenced are Gregory of Rimini, John of Mirecourt, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Pierre d’Ailly, Peter Ceffons, Alfonso Vargas, Peter of Candia (Alexander V), Henry Totting of Oyta, John Major, and lastly, but certainly not leastly, H. P. Grice. Wodeham’s lectures were composed for tutees with a very sophisticated understanding of current issues in semantics, logic, and mathematical physics. Contrary to Duns Scotus and Occam, Wodeham argues – and this is borrowed by Grice -- that the sensitive and intellective souls are not distinct (vide Grice, “The power structure of the soul”). Wodeham further develops the theory of intuitive cognition, distinguishing intellectual intuition of our own acts of intellect, will, and memory from sensory intuition of external objects. This is developed by Grice in his contrast of “I am not hearing a noise,” and “That is not blue.” Thus, knowledge based on experience can be based on intuition, according to Wodeham. Wodeham goes on to distinguishs different grades (or degrees, as Grice prefers, which Grice symbolises as ‘d’) of evidence (for credibility and desirability) and allows that this or that sensory perception may be mistaken (“but if all were, we are in trouble’). Nonetheless, they can form the basis for knowledge, since they are, caeteris paribus, reliable. “A mistake can always be corrected by reason and experience. In semantic and pragmatic theories, Wodeham defends the view that the immediate object of knowledge is what he calls the “complexum significabile,” that which the conclusion is designed to signify.

wolff: “Who’s afraid of the rationalist wolff,” Grice would chant. Grice borrowed (“but I was never able to return”) from Wolff the idea of ‘psychologia rationalis,’ that Grice uses profusely. philosopher and the most powerful advocate for secular rationalism in early eighteenth-century Germany. Although he was a Lutheran, his early education in Catholic Breslau made him familiar with both the Scholasticism of Aquinas and Suárez and more modern sources. His later studies at Leipzig were completed with a dissertation on the application of mathematical methods to ethics (1703), which brought him to the attention of Leibniz. He remained in correspondence with Leibniz until the latter’s death (1716), and became known as the popularizer of Leibniz’s philosophy, although his views did not derive from that source alone. Appointed to teach mathematics in Halle in 1706 (he published mathematical textbooks and compendia that dominated German universities for decades), Wolff began lecturing on philosophy as well by 1709. His rectoral address On the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese (1721) argued that revelation and even belief in God were unnecessary for arriving at sound principles of moral and political reasoning; this brought his uneasy relations with the Halle Pietists to a head, and in 1723 they secured his dismissal and indeed banishment. Wolff was immediately welcomed in Marburg, where he became a hero for freedom of thought, and did not return to Prussia until the ascension of Frederick the Great in 1740, when he resumed his post at Halle. Wolff published an immense series of texts on logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, natural theology, and teleology (1713–24), in which he created the philosophical terminology of modern German; he then published an even more extensive series of works in Latin for the rest of his life, expanding and modifying his German works but also adding works on natural and positive law and economics (1723–55). He accepted the traWodeham, Adam de Wolff, Christian 980   980 ditional division of logic into the doctrines of concepts, judgment, and inference, which influenced the organization of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781–87) and even Hegel’s Science of Logic(1816). In metaphysics, he included general ontology and then the special disciplines of rational cosmology, rational psychology, and rational theology (Kant replaced Wolff’s general ontology with his transcendental aesthetic and analytic, and then demolished Wolff’s special metaphysics in his transcendental dialectic). Wolff’s metaphysics drew heavily on Leibniz, but also on Descartes and even empiricists like Locke. Methodologically, he attempted to derive the principle of sufficient reason from the logical law of identity (like the unpublished Leibniz of the 1680s rather than the published Leibniz of the 1700s); substantively, he began his German metaphysics with a reconstruction of Descartes’s cogito argument, then argued for a simple, immaterial soul, all of its faculties reducible to forms of representation and related to body by preestablished harmony. Although rejected by Crusius and then Kant, Wolff’s attempt to found philosophy on a single principle continued to influence German idealism as late as Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel, and his example of beginning metaphysics from the unique representative power of the soul continued to influence not only later writers such as Reinhold and Fichte but also Kant’s own conception of the transcendental unity of apperception. In spite of the academic influence of his metaphysics, Wolff’s importance for German culture lay in his rationalist rather than theological ethics. He argued that moral worth lies in the perfection of the objective essence of mankind; as the essence of a human is to be an intellect and a will (with the latter dependent on the former), which are physically embodied and dependent for their well-being on the well-being of their physical body, morality requires perfection of the intellect and will, physical body, and external conditions for the well-being of that combination. Each person is obliged to perfect all instantiations of this essence, but in practice does so most effectively in his own case; duties to oneself therefore precede duties to others and to God. Because pleasure is the sensible sign of perfection, Wolff’s perfectionism resembles contemporary utilitarianism. Since he held that human perfection can be understood by human reason independently of any revelation, Wolff joined contemporary British enlighteners such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in arguing that morality does not depend on divine commands, indeed the recognition of divine commands depends on an antecedent comprehension of morality (although morality does require respect for God, and thus the atheistic morality of the Chinese, even though sound as far as it went, was not complete). This was the doctrine that put Wolff’s life in danger, but it had tremendous repercussions for the remainder of his century, and certainly in Kant.

wollaston: when Grice is in a humorous mood, or mode, as he prefers, he cites Wollaston at large! Wollaston is notorious for arguing that the immorality of this or that action lies in an utterer who describes it implicating a false proposition. Wollaston maintains that there is harmony between reason (or truth) and happiness. Therefore, any ction that contradict truth through misrepresentation thereby frustrates human happiness and is thus “plain evil.” Wollaston gives the example of Willard [Quine] who, to pay Paul [Grice], robs Peter [Strawspm] stealing his watch.  Grice comments: “In falsely epresenting Strawson’s watch as his own, Willard makes the act wrong, even if he did it to pay me what he owed me.” Wollaston’s views, particularly his taking morality to consist in universal and necessary truths, were influenced by the rationalists Ralph Cudworth and Clarke. Among his many critics the most famous is, as Grice would expect, Hume, who contends that Wollaston’s theory implies an absurdity (“unless you disimplicate it in the bud.”). For Hume, any action concealed from public view (e.g., adultery) conveys (or ‘explicates’) no false proposition and therefore is not immoral, since one can annul it, to use Grice’s jargon. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Wollaston and the longitudinal unity of philosophy.”

wollheim: R. A. London-born philosopher of Eastern-European ancestry, BPhil Oxon, Balliol (under D. Marcus) and All Souls.  Examined by H. P. Grice. “What’s two times two?” Wollheim treasured that examination. It was in the context of a discussion of J. S. Mill and I. Kant, for whom addition and multiplication are ‘synthetic’ – a priori for Kant, a posteriori for Mill. Grice was trying to provide a counterexample to Mill’s thesis that all comes via deduction or induction.

woodianism: Grice loved O. P. Wood, as anyone at Oxford did – even those who disliked Ryle!

woozleyianism: R. M. Harnish discussed H. P. Grice’s implicaturum with A. D. Woozley. Woozley would know because he had been in contact with Grice since for ever. Woozley had a closer contact with Austin, since, unlike Grice, ‘being from the right side of the tracks,’ he socialized with Austin in what Berlin pretentiously calls the ‘early beginnings of Oxford philosophy,’ as if the Middle Ages never happened. Woozley edited Reid, that Grice read, or reed. Since the first way to approach Grice’s philosophy is with his colleagues at his Play Group, Woozley plays a crucial role. Grice: “While Woozley would attend Austin’s Sat. morns., he wouldn’t say much – in fact, he seldom said much.”

ward: “one of the most philosophical psychologists England (if not Oxford) ever produced!” – H. P. Grice -- cited by H. P. Grice. -- English philosopher. Influenced by Lotze, Herbart, and Brentano, Ward sharply criticized Bain’s associationism and its allied nineteenth-century reductive naturalism. His psychology rejected the associationists’ sensationism, which regarded mind as passive, capable only of sensory receptivity and composed solely of cognitive presentations. Ward emphasized the mind’s inherent activity, asserting, like Kant, the prior existence of an inferred but necessarily existing ego or subject capable of feeling and, most importantly, of conation, shaping both experience and behavior by the willful exercise of attention. Ward’s psychology stresses attention and will. In his metaphysics, Ward resisted the naturalists’ mechanistic materialism, proposing instead a teleological spiritualistic monism. While his criticisms of associationism and naturalism were telling, Ward was a transitional figure whose positive influence is limited, if we except H. P. Grice who follows him to a T. Although sympathetic to scientific psychology  he founded scientific psychology in Britain by establishing a psychology laboratory   he, with his student Stout, represented the beginning of armchair psychology at Oxford, which Grice adored. Through Stout he influenced the hormic psychology of McDougall, and Grice who calls himself a Stoutian “until Prichard converted me”. Ward’s major work is “Psychology” Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., 6, reworked as Psychological Principles 8. 

allegedly ‘wayward’ causal chain: Grice: “What is the antonym of ‘wayward’?’ A causal chain, referred to in a proposed causal analysis of a key concept, that goes awry. Causal analyses have been proposed for key concepts  e.g., reference, action, explanation, knowledge, artwork. There are two main cases of wayward or deviant causal chains that defeat a causal analysis: 1 those in which the prescribed causal route is followed, but the expected event does not occur; and 2 those in which the expected event occurs, but the prescribed causal route is not followed. Consider action. One proposed analysis is that a person’s doing something is an action if and only if what he does is caused by his beliefs and desires. The possibility of wayward causal chains defeats this analysis. For case 1, suppose, while climbing, John finds he is supporting another man on a rope. John wants to rid himself of this danger, and he believes that he can do so by loosening his grip. His belief and desire unnerve him, causing him to loosen his hold. The prescribed causal route was followed, but the ensuing event, his grip loosening, is not an action. For case 2, suppose Harry wants to kill his rich uncle, and he believes that he can find him at home. His beliefs and desires so agitate him that he drives recklessly. He hits and kills a pedestrian, who, by chance, is his uncle. The killing occurs, but without following the prescribed causal route; the killing was an accidental consequence of what Harry did.  Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Aetiologica: from Roman ‘causa’ to Anglo-Saxon ‘for’”, Woodfield, “Be-*cause* he thought she had insulted him,” H. P. Grice, “A philosophical mistake: ‘cause’ is called for for unusual events only.”

weber: philosopher born in Berlin. Grice liked him “because he invented, or thought he invented, more or less, ‘zweckrationalitaet’ – which he refused to translate!” – H. P. Grice.-- born in a liberal and intellectual household, he taught economics in Heidelberg, where his circle included leading sociologists and philosophers such as Simmel and Lukacs. Although Weber gave up his professorship after a nervous breakdown in 9, he remained important in public life, an adviser to the commissions that drafted the peace treaty at Versailles and the Weimar constitution. Weber’s social theory was influenced philosophically by both neo-Kantianism and Nietzsche, creating tensions in a theorist who focused much of his attention on Occidental rationalism and yet was a noncognitivist in ethics. He wrote many comparative studies on topics such as law and urbanization and a celebrated study of the cultural factors responsible for the rise of capitalism, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 4. But his major, synthetic work in social theory is Economy and Society 4; it includes a methodological introduction to the basic concepts of sociology that has been treated by many philosophers of social science. One of the main theoretical goals of Weber’s work is to understand how social processes become “rationalized,” taking up certain themes want-belief model Weber, Max  968 of the G. philosophy of history since Hegel as part of social theory. Culture, e.g., became rationalized in the process of the “disenchantment of worldviews” in the West, a process that Weber thought had “universal significance.” But because of his goal-oriented theory of action and his noncognitivism in ethics, Weber saw rationalization exclusively in terms of the spread of purposive, or meansends rationality Zweckrationalität. Rational action means choosing the most effective means of achieving one’s goals and implies judging the consequences of one’s actions and choices. In contrast, value rationality Wertrationalität consists of actions oriented to ultimate ends, where considerations of consequences are irrelevant. Although such action is rational insofar as it directs and organizes human conduct, the choice of such ends or values themselves cannot be a matter for rational or scientific judgment. Indeed, for Weber this meant that politics was the sphere for the struggle between irreducibly competing ultimate ends, where “gods and demons fight it out” and charismatic leaders invent new gods and values. Professional politicians, however, should act according to an “ethics of responsibility” Verantwortungsethik aimed at consequences, and not an “ethics of conviction” Gesinnungsethik aimed at abstract principles or ultimate ends. Weber also believed that rationalization brought the separation of “value spheres” that can never again be unified by reason: art, science, and morality have their own “logics.” Weber’s influential methodological writings reject positivist philosophy of science, yet call for “value neutrality.” He accepts the neo-Kantian distinction, common in his day under the influence of Rickert, between the natural and the human sciences, between the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften. Because human social action is purposive and meaningful, the explanations of social sciences must be related to the values Wertbezogen and ideals of the actors it studies. Against positivism, Weber saw an ineliminable element of Verstehen, or understanding of meanings, in the methodology of the human sciences. For example, he criticized the legal positivist notion of behavioral conformity for failing to refer to actors’ beliefs in legitimacy. But for Weber Verstehen is not intuition or empathy and does not exclude causal analysis; reasons can be causes. Thus, explanations in social science must have both causal and subjective adequacy. Weber also thought that adequate explanations of large-scale, macrosocial phenomena require the construction of ideal types, which abstract and summarize the common features of complex, empirical phenomena such as “sects,” “authority,” or even “the Protestant ethic.” Weberian ideal types are neither merely descriptive nor simply heuristic, but come at the end of inquiry through the successful theoretical analysis of diverse phenomena in various historical and cultural contexts. Weber’s analysis of rationality as the disenchantment of the world and the spread of purposive reason led him to argue that reason and progress could turn into their opposites, a notion that enormously influenced critical theory. Weber had a critical “diagnosis of the times” and a pessimistic philosophy of history. At the end of The Protestant Ethic Weber warns that rationalism is desiccating sources of value and constructing an “iron cage” of increasing bureaucratization, resulting in a loss of meaning and freedom in social life. According to Weber, these basic tensions of modern rationality cannot be resolved. 

weil: philosopher and writer, born in Paris – “Oddly, if her surname were translated to English she would be “Madame Because”!, as in one of my mother’s favourite ballads!” – H. P. Grice. Weil was one of the first women to graduate from the École Normale Supérieure, having earlier studied under the philosopher Alain. While teaching in various  lycées Weil became involved in radical leftist politics, and her early works concern social problems and labor. They also show an attempt to work out a theory of action as fundamental to human knowing. This is seen first in her diploma essay, “Science and Perception in Descartes,” and later in her critique of Marx, capitalism, and technocracy in “Reflections concerning the Causes of Social Oppression and Liberty.” Believing that humans cannot escape certain basic harsh necessities of embodied life, Weil sought to find a way by which freedom and dignity could be achieved by organizing labor in such a way that the mind could understand that necessity and thereby come to consent to it. After a year of testing her theories by working in three factories in 435, Weil’s early optimism was shattered by the discovery of what she called “affliction” malheur, a destruction of the human person to which one cannot consent. Three important religious experiences, however, caused her to attempt to put the problem into a Weber’s law Weil, Simone 969   969 larger context. By arguing that necessity obeys a transcendent goodness and then by using a kenotic model of Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion, she tried to show that affliction can have a purpose and be morally enlightening. The key is the renunciation of any ultimate possession of power as well as the social personality constituted by that power. This is a process of “attention” and “decreation” by which one sheds the veil that otherwise separates one from appreciating goodness in anything but oneself, but most especially from God. She understands God as a goodness that is revealed in self-emptying and in incarnation, and creation as an act of renunciation and not power. During her last months, while working for the Free  in London, Weil’s social and religious interests came together, especially in The Need for Roots. Beginning with a critique of social rights and replacing it with obligations, Weil sought to show, on the one hand, how modern societies had illegitimately become the focus of value, and on the other hand, how cultures could be reconstructed so that they would root humans in something more ultimate than themselves. Returning to her earlier themes, Weil argued that in order for this rootedness to occur, physical labor must become the spiritual core of culture. Weil died of tuberculosis while this book was in progress. Often regarded as mystical and syncretistic, Weil’s philosophy owes much to an original reading of Plato e.g., in Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Grecians as well as to Marx, Alain, and Christianity. Recent studies, however, have also seen her as significantly contributing to social, moral, and religious philosophy. Her concern with problems of action and persons is not dissimilar to Vitters’s. 

well-formed formula (Villa Grice: formula).  For Grice, an otiosity – surely an ill-formed formula is an oxymoron -- a grammatically wellformed sentence or structured predicate of an artificial language of the sort studied by logicians. A well-formed formula is sometimes known as a wff pronounced ‘woof’ or simply a formula. Delineating the formulas of a language involves providing it with a syntax or grammar, composed of both a vocabulary a specification of the symbols from which the language is to be built, sorted into grammatical categories and formation rules a purely formal or syntactical specification of which strings of symbols are grammatically well-formed and which are not. Formulas are classified as either open or closed, depending on whether or not they contain free variables variables not bound by quantifiers. Closed formulas, such as x Fx / Gx, are sentences, the potential bearers of truth-values. Open formulas, such as Fx / Gx, are handled in any of three ways. On some accounts, these formulas are on a par with closed ones, the free variables being treated as names. On others, open formulas are structured predicates, the free variables being treated as place holders for terms. And on still other accounts, the free variables are regarded as implicitly bound by universal quantifiers, again making open formulas sentences. 

westermarck: “philosopher who spent his life studying all the mores and morals of cultures – except his own – because he claimed he didn’t have one!” – H. P. Grice. His main works, The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas and Ethical Relativity, attack the idea that moral principles express objective value. In defending ethical relativism, he argued that moral judgments are based not on intellectual but on emotional grounds. He admitted that cultural variability in itself does not prove ethical relativism, but contended that the fundamental differences are so comprehensive and deep as to constitute a strong presumption in favor of relativism.  

whewell: English philosopher of science. He was a master of Trinity , Cambridge. Francis Bacon’s early work on induction was furthered by Whewell, J. F. W. Herschel, and J. S. Mill, who attempted to create a logic of welfare economics Whewell, William 970   970 induction, a methodology that can both discover generalizations about experience and prove them to be necessary. Whewell’s theory of scientific method is based on his reading of the history of the inductive sciences. He thought that induction began with a non-inferential act, the superimposition of an idea on data, a “colligation,” a way of seeing facts in a “new light.” Colligations generalize over data, and must satisfy three “tests of truth.” First, colligations must be empirically adequate; they must account for the given data. Any number of ideas may be adequate to explain given data, so a more severe test is required. Second, because colligations introduce generalizations, they must apply to events or properties of objects not yet given: they must provide successful predictions, thereby enlarging the evidence in favor of the colligation. Third, the best inductions are those where evidence for various hypotheses originally thought to cover unrelated kinds of data “jumps together,” providing a consilience of inductions. Consilience characterizes those theories achieving large measures of simplicity, generality, unification, and deductive strength. Furthermore, consilience is a test of the necessary truth of theories, which implies that what many regard as merely pragmatic virtues of theories like simplicity and unifying force have an epistemic status. Whewell thus provides a strong argument for scientific realism. Whewell’s examples of consilient theories are Newton’s theory of universal gravitation, which covers phenomena as seemingly diverse as the motions of the heavenly bodies and the motions of the tides, and the undulatory theory of light, which explains both the polarization of light by crystals and the colors of fringes. There is evidence that Whewell’s methodology was employed by Maxwell, who designed the influential Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge. Peirce and Mach favored Whewell’s account of method over Mill’s empiricist theory of induction. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “From induction to deduction, via abduction.”

whitehead: cited by H. P. Grice, a. n., philosopher of science, educated first at the Sherborne School in Dorsetshire and then at Trinity , Cambridge, Whitehead emerged as a first-class mathematician with a rich general background. In 5 he became a fellow of Trinity  and remained there in a teaching role until 0. In the early 0s Bertrand Russell entered Trinity  as a student in mathematics; by the beginning of the new century Russell had become not only a student and friend but a colleague of Whitehead’s at Trinity . Each had written a first book on algebra Whitehead’s A Treatise on Universal Algebra won him election to the Royal Society in 3. When they discovered that their projected second books largely overlapped, they undertook a collaboration on a volume that they estimated would take about a year to write; in fact, it was a decade later that the three volumes of their ground-breaking Principia Mathematica appeared, launching symbolic logic in its modern form. In the second decade of this century Whitehead and Russell drifted apart; their responses to World War I differed radically, and their intellectual interests and orientations diverged. Whitehead’s London period 024 is often viewed as the second phase of a three-phase career. His association with the  of London involved him in practical issues affecting the character of working-class education. For a decade Whitehead held a professorship at the Imperial  of Science and Technology and also served as dean of the Faculty of Science in the , chair of the Academic Council which managed educational affairs in London, and chair of the council that managed Goldsmith’s . His book The Aims of Education 8 is a collection of essays largely growing out of reflections on the experiences of these years. Intellectually, Whitehead’s interests were moving toward issues in the philosophy of science. In the years 922 he published An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity  the third led to his later 1 election as a fellow of the British Academy. In 4, at the age of sixty-three, Whitehead made a dramatic move, both geographically and intellectually, to launch phase three of his career: never having formally studied philosophy in his life, he agreed to become professor of philosophy at Harvard , a position he held until retirement in 7. The accompanying intellectual shift was a move from philosophy of science to metaphysics. The earlier investigations had assumed the self-containedness of nature: “nature is closed to mind.” The philosophy of nature examined nature at the level of abstraction entailed by this assumption. Whitehead had come to regard philosophy as “the critic of abstractions,” a notion introduced in Science and the Modern World 5. This book traced the intertwined emergence of Newtonian science and its philosophical presuppositions. It noted that with the development of the theory of relativity in the twentieth century, scientific understanding had left behind the Newtonian conceptuality that had generated the still-dominant philosophical assumptions, and that those philosophical assumptions considered in themselves had become inadequate to explicate our full concrete experience. Philosophy as the critic of abstractions must recognize the limitations of a stance that assumes that nature is closed to mind, and must push deeper, beyond such an abstraction, to create a scheme of ideas more in harmony with scientific developments and able to do justice to human beings as part of nature. Science and the Modern World merely outlines what such a philosophy might be; in 9 Whitehead published his magnum opus, titled Process and Reality. In this volume, subtitled “An Essay in Cosmology,” his metaphysical understanding is given its final form. It is customary to regard this book as the central document of what has become known as process philosophy, though Whitehead himself frequently spoke of his system of ideas as the philosophy of organism. Process and Reality begins with a sentence that sheds a great deal of light upon Whitehead’s metaphysical orientation: “These lectures are based upon a recurrence to that phase of philosophic thought which began with Descartes and ended with Hume.” Descartes, adapting the classical notion of substance to his own purposes, begins a “phase of philosophic thought” by assuming there are two distinct, utterly different kinds of substance, mind and matter, each requiring nothing but itself in order to exist. This assumption launches the reign of epistemology within philosophy: if knowing begins with the experiencing of a mental substance capable of existing by itself and cut off from everything external to it, then the philosophical challenge is to try to justify the claim to establish contact with a reality external to it. The phrase “and ended with Hume” expresses Whitehead’s conviction that Hume and more elegantly, he notes, Santayana showed that if one begins with Descartes’s metaphysical assumptions, skepticism is inevitable. Contemporary philosophers have talked about the end of philosophy. From Whitehead’s perspective such talk presupposes a far too narrow view of the nature of philosophy. It is true that a phase of philosophy has ended, a phase dominated by epistemology. Whitehead’s response is to offer the dictum that all epistemological difficulties are at bottom only camouflaged metaphysical difficulties. One must return to that moment of Cartesian beginning and replace the substance metaphysics with an orientation that avoids the epistemological trap, meshes harmoniously with the scientific understandings that have displaced the much simpler physics of Descartes’s day, and is consonant with the facts of evolution. These are the considerations that generate Whitehead’s fundamental metaphysical category, the category of an actual occasion. An actual occasion is not an enduring, substantial entity. Rather, it is a process of becoming, a process of weaving together the “prehensions” a primitive form of ‘apprehension’ meant to indicate a “taking account of,” or “feeling,” devoid of conscious awareness of the actual occasions that are in the immediate past. Whitehead calls this process of weaving together the inheritances of the past “concrescence.” An actual entity is its process of concrescence, its process of growing together into a unified perspective on its immediate past. The seeds of Whitehead’s epistemological realism are planted in these fundamental first moves: “The philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy. . . . For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world.” It is customary to compare an actual occasion with a Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is windowless, an actual occasion is “all window.” It is as though one were to take Aristotle’s system of categories and ask what would result if the category of substance were displaced from its position of preeminence by the category of relation  the result would, mutatis mutandis, be an understanding of being somewhat on the model of a Whiteheadian actual occasion. In moving from Descartes’s dualism of mental substance and material substance to his own notion of an actual entity, Whitehead has been doing philosophy conceived of as the critique of abstractions. He holds that both mind and matter are abstractions from the concretely real. They are important abstractions, necessary for everyday thought and, of supreme importance, absolutely essential in enabling the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries to accomplish their magnificent advances in scientific thinking. Indeed, Whitehead, in his philosophy of science phase, by proceeding as though “nature is closed to mind,” was operating with those selfsame abstractions. He came to see that while these abstractions were indispensable for certain kinds of investigations, they were, at the philosophical level, as Hume had demonstrated, a disaster. In considering mind and matter to be ontological ultimates, Descartes had committed what Whitehead termed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The category of an actual occasion designates the fully real, the fully concrete. The challenge for such an orientation, the challenge that Process and Reality is designed to meet, is so to describe actual occasions that it is intelligible how collections of actual occasions, termed “nexus” or societies, emerge, exhibiting the characteristics we find associated with “minds” and “material structures.” Perhaps most significantly, if this challenge is met successfully, biology will be placed, in the eyes of philosophy, on an even footing with physics; metaphysics will do justice both to human beings and to human beings as a part of nature; and such vexing contemporary problem areas as animal rights and environmental ethics will appear in a new light. Whitehead’s last two books, Adventures of Ideas 3 and Modes of Thought 8, are less technical and more lyrical than is Process and Reality. Adventures of Ideas is clearly the more significant of these two. It presents a philosophical study of the notion of civilization. It holds that the social changes in a civilization are driven by two sorts of forces: brute, senseless agencies of compulsion on the one hand, and formulated aspirations and articulated beliefs on the other. These two sorts of forces are epitomized by barbarians and Christianity in the ancient Roman world and by steam and democracy in the world of the industrial revolution. Whitehead’s focal point in Adventures of Ideas is aspirations, beliefs, and ideals as instruments of change. In particular, he is concerned to articulate the ideals and aspirations appropriate to our own era. The character of such ideals and aspirations at any moment is limited by the philosophical understandings available at that moment, because in their struggle for release and efficacy such ideals and aspirations can appear only in the forms permitted by the available philosophical discourse. In the final section of Adventures of Ideas Whitehead presents a statement of ideals and aspirations fit for our era as his own philosophy of organism allows them to take shape and be articulated. The notions of beauty, truth, adventure, zest, Eros, and peace are given a content drawn from the technical understandings elaborated in Process and Reality. But in Adventures of Ideas a less technical language is used, a language reminiscent of the poetic imagery found in the style of Plato’s Republic, a language making the ideas accessible to readers who have not mastered Process and Reality, but at the same time far richer and more meaningful to those who have. Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas that Plato’s later thought “circles round the interweaving of seven main notions, namely, The Ideas, The Physical Elements, The Psyche, The Eros, The Harmony, The Mathematical Relations, The Receptacle. These notions are as important for us now, as they were then at the dawn of the modern world, when civilizations of the old type were dying.” Whitehead uses these notions in quite novel and modern ways; one who is unfamiliar with his metaphysics can get something of what he means as he speaks of the Eros of the Universe, but if one is familiar from Process and Reality with the notions of the Primordial Nature of God and the Consequent Nature of God then one sees much deeper into the meanings present in Adventures of Ideas. Whitehead was not religious in any narrow, doctrinal, sectarian sense. He explicitly likened his stance to that of Aristotle, dispassionately considering the requirements of his metaphysical system as they refer to the question of the existence and nature of God. Whitehead’s thoughts on these matters are most fully developed in Chapter 11 of Science and the Modern World, in the final chapter of Process and Reality, and in Religion in the Making 6. These thoughts are expressed at a high level of generality. Perhaps because of this, a large part of the interest generated by Whitehead’s thought has been within the community of theologians. His ideas fairly beg for elaboration and development in the context of particular modes of religious understanding. It is as though many modern theologians, recalling the relation between the theology of Aquinas and the metaphysics of Aristotle, cannot resist the temptation to play Aquinas to Whitehead’s Aristotle. Process theology, or Neo-Classical Theology as it is referred to by Hartshorne, one of its leading practitioners, has been the arena within which a great deal of clarification and development of Whitehead’s ideas has occurred. Whitehead was a gentle man, soft-spoken, never overbearing or threatening. He constantly encouraged students to step out on their own, to develop their creative capacities. His concern not to inhibit students made him a notoriously easy grader; it was said that an A-minus in one of his courses was equivalent to failure. Lucien Price’s Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead chronicles many evenings of discussion in the Whitehead household. He there described Whitehead as follows: his face, serene, luminous, often smiling, the complexion pink and white, the eyes brilliant blue, clear and candid as a child’s yet with the depth of the sage, often laughing or twinkling with humour. And there was his figure, slender, frail, and bent with its lifetime of a scholar’s toil. Always benign, there was not a grain of ill will anywhere in him; for all his formidable armament, never a wounding word.  Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Definite descriptions in Whitehead and Russell and in the vernacular,” “Definite descriptions in Whitethead’s and Russell’s formalese and in Strawson’s vernacular” -- BANC.

alnwick: English Franciscan theologian from Northumbria -- William studied under Duns Scotus at Paris, and wrote the Reportatio Parisiensia, a central source for Duns Scotus’s teaching. In his own works, William opposed Scotus on the univocity of being and haecceitas. Some of his views were attacked by Ockham.  

auvergne: g. c.11249,  philosopher who was born in Aurillac, taught at Paris, and became bishop of Paris in 1228. Critical of the new Aristotelianism of his time, he insisted that the soul is an individual, immortal form of intellectual activity alone, so that a second form was needed for the body and sensation. Though he rejected the notion of an agent intellect, he described the soul as a mirror that reflects both exemplary ideas in God’s mind and sensible singulars. He conceived being as something common to everything that is, after the manner of Duns Scotus, but rejected the Avicennan doctrine that God necessarily produces the universe, arguing that His creative activity is free of all determination. He is the first example of the complex of ideas we call Augustinianism, which would pass on through Alexander of Hales to Bonaventure and other Franciscans, forming a point of departure for the philosophy of Duns Scotus. 

auxerre:  theologian and renowned teacher of grammar, arts, and theology at the  of Paris. In 1231 he was appointed by Pope Gregory IX to a commission charged with editing Aristotle’s writings for doctrinal purity. The commission never submitted a report, perhaps partly due to William’s death later that same year. William’s major work, the Summa aurea 121520, represents one of the earliest systematic attempts to reconcile the Augustinian and Aristotelian traditions in medieval philosophy. William tempers, e.g., the Aristotelian concession that human cognition begins with the reception in the material intellect of a species or sensible representation from a corporeal thing, with the Augustinian idea that it is not possible to understand the principles of any discipline without an interior, supernatural illumination. He also originated the theological distinction between perfect happiness, which is uncreated and proper to God, and imperfect happiness, which pertains to human beings. William was also one of the first to express what became, in later centuries, the important distinction between God’s absolute and ordained powers, taking, with Gilbert of Poitiers, the view that God could, absolutely speaking, change the past. The Summa aurea helped shape the thought of several important philosophers and theologians who were active later in the century, including Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, and Aquinas. William remained an authority in theological discussions throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  

moerbeke.: philosopher who tr. from Grecian into Latin of works in philosophy and natural science. Having joined the Dominicans and spent some time in Grecian-speaking territories, William served at the papal court and then as Catholic archbishop of Corinth 1278c.1286. But he worked from the 1260s on as a careful and literal-minded translator. William was the first to render into Latin some of the most important works by Aristotle, including the Politics, Poetics, and History of Animals. He retr. or revised earlier translations of several other Aristotelian works. William also provided the first Latin versions of commentaries on Aristotle by Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Ammonius, John Philoponus, and Simplicius, not to mention his efforts on behalf of Grecian optics, mathematics, and medicine. When William provided the first Latin translation of Proclus’s Elements of Theology, Western readers could at last recognize the Liber de causis as an Arabic compilation from Proclus rather than as a work by Aristotle. 

williams: “There are many Williams in Oxford, but only one “B. A. O., “ as he pretentiously went by!” – H. P. Grice. B. A. O. London-born Welsh philosopher who has made major contributions to many fields but is primarily known as a moral philosopher. His approach to ethics, set out in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy 5, is characterized by a wide-ranging skepticism, directed mainly at the capacity of academic moral philosophy to further the aim of reflectively living an ethical life. One line of skeptical argument attacks the very idea of practical reason. Attributions of practical reasons to a particular agent must, in Williams’s view, be attributions of states that can potentially explain the agent’s action. Therefore such reasons must be either within the agent’s existing set of motivations or within the revised set of motivations that the agent would acquire upon sound reasoning. Williams argues from these minimal assumptions that this view of reasons as internal reasons undermines the idea of reason itself being a source of authority over practice. Williams’s connected skepticism about the claims of moral realism is based both on his general stance toward realism and on his view of the nature of modern societies. In opposition to internal realism, Williams has consistently argued that reflection on our conception of the world allows one to develop a conception of the world maximally independent of our peculiar ways of conceptualizing reality  an absolute conception of the world. Such absoluteness is, he argues, an inappropriate aspiration for ethical thought. Our ethical thinking is better viewed as one way of structuring a form of ethical life than as the ethical truth about how life is best lived. The pervasive reflectiveness and radical pluralism of modern societies makes them inhospitable contexts for viewing ethical concepts as making knowledge available to groups of concept users. Modernity has produced at the level of theory a distortion of our ethical practice, namely a conception of the morality system. This view is reductionist, is focused centrally on obligations, and rests on various fictions about responsibility and blame that Williams challenges in such works as Shame and Necessity 3. Much academic moral philosophy, in his view, is shaped by the covert influence of the morality system, and such distinctively modern outlooks as Kantianism and utilitarianism monopolize the terms of contemporary debate with insufficient attention to their origin in a distorted view of the ethical. Williams’s views are not skeptical through and through; he retains a commitment to the values of truth, truthfulness in a life, and individualism. His most recent work, which thematizes the long-implicit influence of Nietzsche on his ethical philosophy, explicitly offers a vindicatory “genealogical” narrative for these ideals.

wilson: J. C. – not to be confused with Neil Wilson, author of “Grice: The ultimate counterexample” -- Oxonian philosopher, like Grice. Cook Wilson studied with T. H. Green before becoming Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford and leading the Oxford reaction against the then entrenched absolute idealism. More influential as a tutor than as a writer, his major oeuvre, Statement and Inference, was posthumously reconstructed from drafts of papers, philosophical correspondence, and an extensive set of often inconsistent lectures for his logic courses. A staunch critic of Whitehead’s mathematical logic, Wilson conceived of logic as the study of thinking, an activity unified by the fact that thinking either is knowledge or depends on knowledge “What we know we kow”. Wilson claims that knowledge involves apprehending an object that in most cases is independent of the act of apprehension and that knowledge is indefinable without circularity, views he defended by appealing to common usage. Many of Wilson’s ideas are disseminated by H. W. B. Joseph, especially in his “Logic.” Rejecting “symbolic logic,” Joseph attempts to reinvigorate traditional logic conceived along Wilsonian lines. To do so Joseph combined a careful exposition of Aristotle with insights drawn from idealistic logicians. Besides Joseph, Wilson decisively influenced a generation of Oxford philosophers including Prichard and Ross, and Grice who explores the ‘interrogative subordination’ in the account of ‘if.’ “Who killed Cock Robin”.

windelband: philosopher and originator of Baden neoKantianism. He studied under Kuno Fischer 18247 and Lotze, and was professor at Zürich, Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. Windelband gave Baden neo-Kantianism its distinctive mark of Kantian axiology as the core of critical philosophy. He is widely recognized for innovative work in the history of philosophy, in which problems rather than individual philosophers are the focus and organizing principle of exposition. He is also known for his distinction, first drawn in “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft” “History and Natural Science,” 4, between the nomothetic knowledge that most natural sciences seek the discovery of general laws in order to master nature and the idiographic knowledge that the historical sciences pursue description of individual and unique aspects of reality with the aim of self-affirmation. His most important student, and successor at Heidelberg, was Heinrich Rickert 1863 6, who made lasting contributions to the methodology of the historical sciences.

scire – sapio -- sapientia: wisdom, an understanding of the highest principles of things that functions as a guide for living a truly exemplary human life. From the preSocratics through Plato this was a unified notion. But Aristotle introduced a distinction between theoretical wisdom sophia and practical wisdom phronesis, the former being the intellectual virtue that disposed one to grasp the nature of reality in terms of its ultimate causes metaphysics, the latter being the ultimate practical virtue that disposed one to make sound judgments bearing on the conduct of life. The former invoked a contrast between deep understanding versus wide information, whereas the latter invoked a contrast between sound judgment and mere technical facility. This distinction between theoretical and practical wisdom persisted through the Middle Ages and continues to our own day, as is evident in our use of the term ‘wisdom’ to designate both knowledge of the highest kind and the capacity for sound judgment in matters of conduct. Grice: “The etymology of ‘sapientia’ is excellent – it’s like taste!” –  săpĭo , īvi or ĭi (sapui, Aug. Civ. Dei, 1, 10; id. Ep. 102, 10; but sapivi, Nov. ap. Prisc. p. 879 P.; id. ap. Non. 508, 21: I.“saPisti,” Mart. 9, 6, 7: “sapisset,” Plaut. Rud. 4, 1, 8), 3, v. n. and a. [kindr. with ὀπός, σαφής, and σοφός], to taste, savor; to taste, smack, or savor of, to have a taste or flavor of a thing (cf. gusto). I. Lit. (so only in a few examples). 1. Of things eaten or drunk: “oleum male sapiet,” Cato, R. R. 66, 1: “occisam saepe sapere plus multo suem,” Plaut. Mil. 2, 6, 104: “quin caseus jucundissime sapiat,” Col. 7, 8, 2: “nil rhombus nil dama sapit,” Juv. 11, 121.—With an acc. of that of or like which a thing tastes: “quis (piscis) saperet ipsum mare,” Sen. Q. N. 3, 18, 2: “cum in Hispaniā multa mella herbam eam sapiunt,” Plin. 11, 8, 8, § 18: “ipsum aprum (ursina),” Petr. 66, 6.—Poet.: anas plebeium sapit, has a vulgar taste, Petr. poët. 93, 2: “quaesivit quidnam saperet simius,” Phaedr. 3, 4, 3.—* 2. Of that which tastes, to have a taste or a sense of taste (perh. so used for the sake of the play upon signif. II.): “nec sequitur, ut, cui cor sapiat, ei non sapiat palatus,” Cic. Fin. 2, 8, 24.— 3. Transf., of smell, to smell of or like a thing (syn.: oleo, redoleo; very rare): Cicero, Meliora, inquit, unguenta sunt, quae terram quam crocum sapiunt. Hoc enim maluit dixisse quam redolent. Ita est profecto; “illa erit optima, quae unguenta sapiat,” Plin. 17, 5, 3, § 38: “invenitur unguenta gratiosiora esse, quae terram, quam quae crocum sapiunt,” id. 13, 3, 4, § 21.—In a lusus verbb. with signif. II.: istic servus quid sapit? Ch. Hircum ab alis, Plaut. Ps. 2, 4, 47.— II. Trop. 1. To taste or smell of, savor of, i. e., a. To resemble (late Lat.): “patruos,” Pers. 1, 11.— b. To suggest, be inspired by: “quia non sapis ea quae Dei sunt,” Vulg. Matt. 16, 23; id. Marc. 8, 33.— c. Altum or alta sapere, to be high-minded or proud: “noli altum sapere,” Vulg. Rom. 11, 20: “non alta sapientes,” id. ib. 12, 16.— 2. To have good taste, i.e. to have sense or discernment; to be sensible, discreet, prudent, wise, etc. (the predominant signif. in prose and poetry; most freq. in the P. a.). (α). Neutr., Plaut. Ps. 2, 3, 14: “si aequum siet Me plus sapere quam vos, dederim vobis consilium catum, etc.,” id. Ep. 2, 2, 73 sq.: “jam diu edepol sapientiam tuam abusa est haec quidem. Nunc hinc sapit, hinc sentit,” id. Poen. 5, 4, 30; cf.: “populus est moderatior, quoad sentit et sapit tuerique vult per se constitutam rem publicam,” Cic. Rep. 1, 42, 65; “so (with sentire),” Plaut. Am. 1, 1, 292; id. Bacch. 4, 7, 19; id. Merc. 2, 2, 24; id. Trin. 3, 2, 10 sq.; cf.: “qui sapere et fari possit quae sentiat,” Hor. Ep. 1, 4, 9; Plaut. Bacch. 1, 2, 14: “magna est admiratio copiose sapienterque dicentis, quem qui audiunt intellegere etiam et sapere plus quam ceteros arbitrantur,” Cic. Off. 2, 14, 48: “veluti mater Plus quam se sapere Vult (filium),” Hor. Ep. 1, 18, 27: “qui (puer) cum primum sapere coepit,” Cic. Fam. 14, 1, 1; Poët. ap. Cic. Fam. 7, 16, 1: “malo, si sapis, cavebis,” if you are prudent, wise, Plaut. Cas. 4, 4, 17; so, “si sapis,” id. Eun. 1, 1, 31; id. Men. 1, 2, 13; id. Am. 1, 1, 155; id. Aul. 2, 9, 5; id. Curc. 1, 1, 28 et saep.; Ter. Eun. 4, 4, 53; id. Heaut. 2, 3, 138: “si sapias,” Plaut. Merc. 2, 3, 39; 4, 4, 61; id. Poen. 1, 2, 138; Ter. Heaut. 3, 3, 33; Ov. H. 5, 99; 20, 174: “si sapies,” Plaut. Bacch. 4, 9, 78; id. Rud. 5, 3, 35; Ter. Heaut. 4, 4, 26; Ov. M. 14, 675: “si sapiam,” Plaut. Men. 4, 2, 38; id. Rud. 1, 2, 8: “si sapiet,” id. Bacch. 4, 9, 74: “si saperet,” Cic. Quint. 4, 16: hi sapient, * Caes. B. G. 5, 30: Ph. Ibo. Pl. Sapis, you show your good sense, Plaut. Mil. 4, 8, 9; id. Merc. 5, 2, 40: “hic homo sapienter sapit,” id. Poen. 3, 2, 26: “quae (meretrix) sapit in vino ad rem suam,” id. Truc. 4, 4, 1; cf. id. Pers. 1, 3, 28: “ad omnia alia aetate sapimus rectius,” Ter. Ad. 5, 3, 46: “haud stulte sapis,” id. Heaut. 2, 3, 82: “te aliis consilium dare, Foris sapere,” id. ib. 5, 1, 50: “pectus quoi sapit,” Plaut. Bacch. 4, 4, 12; id. Mil. 3, 1, 191; id. Trin. 1, 2, 53; cf.: “cui cor sapiat,” Cic. Fin. 2, 8, 24: “id (sc. animus mensque) sibi solum per se sapit, id sibi gaudet,” Lucr. 3, 145.— (β). Act., to know, understand a thing (in good prose usually only with general objects): “recte ego rem meam sapio,” Plaut. Ps. 1, 5, 81: “nullam rem,” id. Most. 5, 1, 45: qui sibi semitam non sapiunt, alteri monstrant viam, Poët. ap. Cic. Div. 1, 58, 132; Cic. Att. 14, 5, 1; Plaut. Mil. 2, 3, 65; cf.: “quamquam quis, qui aliquid sapiat, nunc esse beatus potest?” Cic. Fam. 7, 28, 1: “quantum ego sapio,” Plin. Ep. 3, 6, 1: “jam nihil sapit nec sentit,” Plaut. Bacch. 4, 7, 22: “nihil,” Cic. Tusc. 2, 19, 45: “plane nihil,” id. Div. in Caecil. 17, 55: nihil parvum, i. e. to occupy one's mind with nothing trivial (with sublimia cures), Hor. Ep. 1, 12, 15; cf.: cum sapimus patruos, i.e. resemble them, imitate them in severity, Pers. 1, 11. — 3. Prov.: sero sapiunt Phryges, are wise behind the time; or, as the Engl. saying is, are troubled with afterwit: “sero sapiunt Phryges proverbium est natum a Trojanis, qui decimo denique anno velle coeperant Helenam quaeque cum eā erant rapta reddere Achivis,” Fest. p. 343 Müll.: “in Equo Trojano (a tragedy of Livius Andronicus or of Naevius) scis esse in extremo, Sero sapiunt. Tu tamen, mi vetule, non sero,” Cic. Fam. 7, 16, 1.—Hence, să-pĭens , entis (abl. sing. sapiente, Ov. M. 10, 622; gen. plur. sapientum, Lucr. 2, 8; Hor. S. 2, 3, 296; “but sapientium,” id. C. 3, 21, 14), P. a. (acc. to II.), wise, knowing, sensible, well-advised, discreet, judicious (cf. prudens). A. In gen.: “ut quisque maxime perspicit, quid in re quāque verissimum sit, quique acutissime et celerrime potest et videre et explicare rationem, is prudentissimus et sapientissimus rite haberi solet,” Cic. Off. 1, 5, 16; cf.: “sapientissimum esse dicunt eum, cui quod opus sit ipsi veniat in mentem: proxume acceder illum, qui alterius bene inventis obtemperet,” id. Clu. 31, 84: “M. Bucculeius, homo neque meo judicio stultus et suo valde sapiens,” id. de Or. 1, 39, 179: “rex aequus ac sapiens,” id. Rep. 1, 26, 42; cf.: “Cyrus justissimus sapientissimusque rex,” id. ib. 1, 27, 43: “bonus et sapiens et peritus utilitatis civilis,” id. ib. 2, 29, 52: “o, Neptune lepide, salve, Neque te aleator ullus est sapientior,” Plaut. Rud. 2, 3, 29: “quae tibi mulier videtur multo sapientissima?” id. Stich. 1, 2, 66: “(Aurora) ibat ad hunc (Cephalum) sapiens a sene diva viro,” wise, discreet, Ov. H. 4, 96 Ruhnk.; so, “puella,” id. M. 10, 622: “mus pusillus quam sit sapiens bestia,” Plaut. Truc. 4, 4, 15; id. As. 3, 3, 114 et saep.—With gen. (analogous to gnarus, peritus, etc.): “qui sapiens rerum esse humanarum velit,” Gell. 13, 8, 2.—Subst.: săpĭens , entis, m., a sensible, shrewd, knowing, discreet, or judicious person: “semper cavere hoc sapientes aequissimumst,” Plaut. Rud. 4, 7, 20; cf.: “omnes sapientes suom officium aequom est colere et facere,” id. Stich. 1, 1, 38; id. Trin. 2, 2, 84: “dictum sapienti sat est,” id. Pers. 4, 7, 19; Ter. Phorm. 3, 3, 8; Plaut. Rud. 2, 4, 15 sq.: “insani sapiens nomen ferat, aequus iniqui,” Hor. Ep. 1, 6, 15: “sapiens causas reddet,” id. S. 1, 4, 115: “quali victu sapiens utetur,” id. ib. 2, 2, 63; 1, 3, 132.—In a lusus verbb. with the signif. of sapio, I., a person of nice taste: “qui utuntur vino vetere sapientes puto Et qui libenter veteres spectant fabulas,” good judges, connoisseurs, Plaut. Cas. prol. 5: fecundae leporis sapiens sectabitur armos, Hor. S. 2, 4, 44.—As a surname of the jurists Atilius, C. Fabricius, M'. Curius, Ti. Coruncanius, Cato al., v. under B. fin.— b. Of abstract things: “opera,” Plaut. Pers. 4, 5, 2: “excusatio,” Cic. Att. 8, 12, 2: “modica et sapiens temperatio,” id. Leg. 3, 7, 17: “mores,” Plaut. Rud. 4, 7, 25: “verba,” Ter. Ad. 5, 1, 7: “consilium,” Ov. M. 13, 433: “Ulixes, vir sapienti facundiā praeditus,” Gell. 1, 15, 3: “morus, quae novissima urbanarum germinat, nec nisi exacto frigore, ob id dicta sapientissima arborum,” Plin. 16, 25, 41, § 102.— B. After the predominance of Grecian civilization and literature, particularly of the Grecian philosophy, like σοφός, well acquainted with the true value of things, wise; and subst., a wise man, a sage (in Cic. saepiss.): ergo hic, quisquis est, qui moderatione et constantiā quietus animo est sibique ipse placatus ut nec tabescat molestiis nec frangatur timore nec sitienter quid expetens ardeat desiderio nec alacritate futili gestiens deliquescat; “is est sapiens quem quaerimus, is est beatus,” Cic. Tusc. 4, 17, 37: “sapientium praecepta,” id. Rep. 3, 4, 7: “si quod raro fit, id portentum putandum est: sapientem esse portentum est. Saepius enim mulam peperisse arbitror, quam sapientem fuisse,” id. Div. 2, 28, 61: “statuere quid sit sapiens, vel maxime videtur esse sapientis,” id. Ac. 2, 3, 9; cf. id. Rep. 1, 29, 45.—So esp. of the seven wise men of Greece: “ut ad Graecos referam orationem ... septem fuisse dicuntur uno tempore, qui sapientes et haberentur et vocarentur,” Cic. de Or. 3, 34, 137: “eos vero septem quos Graeci sapientes nominaverunt,” id. Rep. 1, 7, 12: “sapienti assentiri ... se sapientem profiteri,” id. Fin. 2,3, 7.—Ironically: “sapientum octavus,” Hor. S. 2, 3, 296.—With the Romans, an appellation of Lœlius: te, Laeli, sapientem et appellant et existimant. Tribuebatur hoc modo M. Catoni: scimus L. Atilium apud patres nostros appellatum esse sapientem, sed uterque alio quodam modo: Atilius, qui prudens esse in jure civili putabatur; “Cato quia multarum rerum usum habebat ... propterea quasi cognomen jam habebat in senectute sapientis ... Athenis unum accepimus et eum quidem etiam Apollinis oraculo sapientissimum judicatum,” Cic. Lael. 2, 6; cf.: “numquam ego dicam C. Fabricium, M'. Curium, Ti. Coruncanium, quos sapientes nostri majores judicabant, ad istorum normam fuisse sapientes,” id. ib. 5, 18: “ii, qui sapientes sunt habiti, M. Cato et C. Laelius,” id. Off. 3, 4, 16; Val. Max. 4, 1, ext. 7; Lact. 4, 1.—Hence, adv.: săpĭen-ter , sensibly, discreetly, prudently, judiciously, wisely: “recte et sapienter facere,” Plaut. Am. 1, 1, 133; id. Mil. 3, 3, 34: “consulere,” id. ib. 3, 1, 90: “insipienter factum sapienter ferre,” id. Truc. 4, 3, 33: “factum,” id. Aul. 3, 5, 3: “dicta,” id. Rud. 4, 7, 24: “quam sapienter jam reges hoc nostri viderint,” Cic. Rep. 2, 17, 31: “provisa,” id. ib. 4, 3, 3: “a majoribus prodita fama,” id. ib. 2, 2, 4: “considerate etiam sapienterque fecerunt,” id. Phil. 4, 2, 6; 13, 6, 13: “vives sapienter,” Hor. Ep. 1, 10, 44: “agendum,” Ov. M. 13, 377: “temporibus uti,” Nep. Epam. 3, 1; Hor. C. 4, 9, 48.—Comp.: “facis sapientius Quam pars latronum, etc.,” Plaut. Curc. 4, 3, 15; id. Poen. prol. 7: “nemo est, qui tibi sapientius suadere possit te ipso,” Cic. Fam. 2, 7, 1: “sapientius fecisse,” id. Brut. 42, 155.—Sup.: “quod majores nostros et probavisse maxime et retinuisse sapientissime judico,” Cic. Rep. 2, 37, 63. Vide H. P. Grice, “Philosophy: love of wisdom, love of taste,” BANC.

viters, sraffa, and Grice --  L. – cited by H. P. Grice, “Some like Vitters, but Moore’s MY man.” Vienna-born philosopher trained as an enginner at Manchester. Typically referred to Wittgenstein in the style of English schoolboy slang of the time as, “Witters,” pronounced “Vitters.”“I heard Austin said once: ‘Some like Witters, but Moore’s MY man.’ Austin would open the “Philosophical Investigations,” and say, “Let’s see what Witters has to say about this.” Everybody ended up loving Witters at the playgroup.” Witters’s oeuvre was translated first into English by C. K. Ogden. There are interesting twists. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Vitters.” Grice was sadly discomforted when one of his best friends at Oxford, D. F. Pears, dedicated so much effort to the unveiling of the mysteries of ‘Vitters.’ ‘Vitters’ was all in the air in Grice’s inner circle. Strawson had written a review of Philosophical Investigations. Austin was always mocking ‘Vitters,’ and there are other connections. For Grice, the most important is that remark in “Philosohpical Investigations,” which he never cared to check ‘in the Hun,’ about a horse not being seen ‘as a horse.’ But in “Prolegomena” he mentions Vitters in other contexts, too, and in “Causal Theory,” almost anonymously – but usually with regard to the ‘seeing as’ puzzle. Grice would also rely on Witters’s now knowing how to use ‘know’ or vice versa. In “Method” Grice quotes verbatim: ‘No psyche without the manifestation the ascription of psyche is meant to explain,” and also to the effect that most ‘-etic’ talk of behaviour is already ‘-emic,’ via internal perspective, or just pervaded with intentionalism. One of the most original and challenging philosophical writers of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna into an assimilated family of Jewish extraction, he went to England as a student and eventually became a protégé of Russell’s at Cambridge. He returned to Austria at the beginning of The Great War I, but went back to Cambridge in 8 and taught there as a fellow and professor. Despite spending much of his professional life in England, Vitters never lost contact with his Austrian background, and his writings combine in a unique way ideas derived from both the insular and the continental European tradition. His thought is strongly marked by a deep skepticism about philosophy, but he retained the conviction that there was something important to be rescued from the traditional enterprise. In his Blue Book 8 he referred to his own work as “one of the heirs of the subject that used to be called philosophy.” What strikes readers first when they look at Vitters’s writings is the peculiar form of their composition. They are generally made up of short individual notes that are most often numbered in sequence and, in the more finished writings, evidently selected and arranged with the greatest care. Those notes range from fairly technical discussions on matters of logic, the mind, meaning, understanding, acting, seeing, mathematics, and knowledge, to aphoristic observations about ethics, culture, art, and the meaning of life. Because of their wide-ranging character, their unusual perspective on things, and their often intriguing style, Vitters’s writings have proved to appeal to both professional philosophers and those interested in philosophy in a more general way. The writings as well as his unusual life and personality have already produced a large body of interpretive literature. But given his uncompromising stand, it is questionable whether his thought will ever be fully integrated into academic philosophy. It is more likely that, like Pascal and Nietzsche, he will remain an uneasy presence in philosophy. From an early date onward Vitters was greatly influenced by the idea that philosophical problems can be resolved by paying attention to the working of language  a thought he may have gained from Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache 102. Vitters’s affinity to Mauthner is, indeed, evident in all phases of his philosophical development, though it is particularly noticeable in his later thinking.Until recently it has been common to divide Vitters’s work into two sharply distinct phases, separated by a prolonged period of dormancy. According to this schema the early “Tractarian” period is that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1, which Vitters wrote in the trenches of World War I, and the later period that of the Philosophical Investigations 3, which he composed between 6 and 8. But the division of his work into these two periods has proved misleading. First, in spite of obvious changes in his thinking, Vitters remained throughout skeptical toward traditional philosophy and persisted in channeling philosophical questioning in a new direction. Second, the common view fails to account for the fact that even between 0 and 8, when Vitters abstained from actual work in philosophy, he read widely in philosophical and semiphilosophical authors, and between 8 and 6 he renewed his interest in philosophical work and wrote copiously on philosophical matters. The posthumous publication of texts such as The Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grammar, Philosophical Remarks, and Conversations with the Vienna Circle has led to acknowledgment of a middle period in Vitters’s development, in which he explored a large number of philosophical issues and viewpoints  a period that served as a transition between the early and the late work. Early period. As the son of a greatly successful industrialist and engineer, Vitters first studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester, and traces of that early training are evident throughout his writing. But his interest shifted soon to pure mathematics and the foundations of mathematics, and in pursuing questions about them he became acquainted with Russell and Frege and their work. The two men had a profound and lasting effect on Vitters even when he later came to criticize and reject their ideas. That influence is particularly noticeable in the Tractatus, which can be read as an attempt to reconcile Russell’s atomism with Frege’s apriorism. But the book is at the same time moved by quite different and non-technical concerns. For even before turning to systematic philosophy Vitters had been profoundly moved by Schopenhauer’s thought as it is spelled out in The World as Will and Representation, and while he was serving as a soldier in World War I, he renewed his interest in Schopenhauer’s metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, and mystical outlook. The resulting confluence of ideas is evident in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and gives the book its peculiar character. Composed in a dauntingly severe and compressed style, the book attempts to show that traditional philosophy rests entirely on a misunderstanding of “the logic of our language.” Following in Frege’s and Russell’s footsteps, Vitters argued that every meaningful sentence must have a precise logical structure. That structure may, however, be hidden beneath the clothing of the grammatical appearance of the sentence and may therefore require the most detailed analysis in order to be made evident. Such analysis, Vitters was convinced, would establish that every meaningful sentence is either a truth-functional composite of another simpler sentence or an atomic sentence consisting of a concatenation of simple names. He argued further that every atomic sentence is a logical picture of a possible state of affairs, which must, as a result, have exactly the same formal structure as the atomic sentence that depicts it. He employed this “picture theory of meaning”  as it is usually called  to derive conclusions about the nature of the world from his observations about the structure of the atomic sentences. He postulated, in particular, that the world must itself have a precise logical structure, even though we may not be able to determine it completely. He also held that the world consists primarily of facts, corresponding to the true atomic sentences, rather than of things, and that those facts, in turn, are concatenations of simple objects, corresponding to the simple names of which the atomic sentences are composed. Because he derived these metaphysical conclusions from his view of the nature of language, Vitters did not consider it essential to describe what those simple objects, their concatenations, and the facts consisting of them are actually like. As a result, there has been a great deal of uncertainty and disagreement among interpreters about their character. The propositions of the Tractatus are for the most part concerned with spelling out Vitters’s account of the logical structure of language and the world and these parts of the book have understandably been of most interest to philosophers who are primarily concerned with questions of symbolic logic and its applications. But for Vitters himself the most important part of the book consisted of the negative conclusions about philosophy that he reaches at the end of his text: in particular, that all sentences that are not atomic pictures of concatenations of objects or truth-functional composites of such are strictly speaking meaningless. Among these he included all the propositions of ethics and aesthetics, all propositions dealing with the meaning of life, all propositions of logic, indeed all philosophical propositions, and finally all the propositions of the Tractatus itself. These are all strictly meaningless; they aim at saying something important, but what they try to express in words can only show itself. As a result Vitters concluded that anyone who understood what the Tractatus was saying would finally discard its propositions as senseless, that she would throw away the ladder after climbing up on it. Someone who reached such a state would have no more temptation to pronounce philosophical propositions. She would see the world rightly and would then also recognize that the only strictly meaningful propositions are those of natural science; but those could never touch what was really important in human life, the mystical. That would have to be contemplated in silence. For “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” as the last proposition of the Tractatus declared. Middle period. It was only natural that Vitters should not embark on an academic career after he had completed that work. Instead he trained to be a school teacher and taught primary school for a number of years in the mountains of lower Austria. In the mid-0s he also built a house for his sister; this can be seen as an attempt to give visual expression to the logical, aesthetic, and ethical ideas of the Tractatus. In those years he developed a number of interests seminal for his later development. His school experience drew his attention to the way in which children learn language and to the whole process of enculturation. He also developed an interest in psychology and read Freud and others. Though he remained hostile to Freud’s theoretical explanations of his psychoanalytic work, he was fascinated with the analytic practice itself and later came to speak of his own work as therapeutic in character. In this period of dormancy Vitters also became acquainted with the members of the Vienna Circle, who had adopted his Tractatus as one of their key texts. For a while he even accepted the positivist principle of meaning advocated by the members of that Circle, according to which the meaning of a sentence is the method of its verification. This he would later modify into the more generous claim that the meaning of a sentence is its use. Vitters’s most decisive step in his middle period was to abandon the belief of the Tractatus that meaningful sentences must have a precise hidden logical structure and the accompanying belief that this structure corresponds to the logical structure of the facts depicted by those sentences. The Tractatus had, indeed, proceeded on the assumption that all the different symbolic devices that can describe the world must be constructed according to the same underlying logic. In a sense, there was then only one meaningful language in the Tractatus, and from it one was supposed to be able to read off the logical structure of the world. In the middle period Vitters concluded that this doctrine constituted a piece of unwarranted metaphysics and that the Tractatus was itself flawed by what it had tried to combat, i.e., the misunderstanding of the logic of language. Where he had previously held it possible to ground metaphysics on logic, he now argued that metaphysics leads the philosopher into complete darkness. Turning his attention back to language he concluded that almost everything he had said about it in the Tractatus had been in error. There were, in fact, many different languages with many different structures that could meet quite different specific needs. Language was not strictly held together by logical structure, but consisted, in fact, of a multiplicity of simpler substructures or language games. Sentences could not be taken to be logical pictures of facts and the simple components of sentences did not all function as names of simple objects. These new reflections on language served Vitters, in the first place, as an aid to thinking about the nature of the human mind, and specifically about the relation between private experience and the physical world. Against the existence of a Cartesian mental substance, he argued that the word ‘I’ did not serve as a name of anything, but occurred in expressions meant to draw attention to a particular body. For a while, at least, he also thought he could explain the difference between private experience and the physical world in terms of the existence of two languages, a primary language of experience and a secondary language of physics. This duallanguage view, which is evident in both the Philosophical Remarks and The Blue Book, Vitters was to give up later in favor of the assumption that our grasp of inner phenomena is dependent on the existence of outer criteria. From the mid-0s onward he also renewed his interest in the philosophy of mathematics. In contrast to Frege and Russell, he argued strenuously that no part of mathematics is reducible purely to logic. Instead he set out to describe mathematics as part of our natural history and as consisting of a number of diverse language games. He also insisted that the meaning of those games depended on the uses to which the mathematical formulas were put. Applying the principle of verification to mathematics, he held that the meaning of a mathematical formula lies in its proof. These remarks on the philosophy of mathematics have remained among Vitters’s most controversial and least explored writings. Later period. Vitters’s middle period was characterized by intensive philosophical work on a broad but quickly changing front. By 6, however, his thinking was finally ready to settle down once again into a steadier pattern, and he now began to elaborate the views for which he became most famous. Where he had constructed his earlier work around the logic devised by Frege and Russell, he now concerned himself mainly with the actual working of ordinary language. This brought him close to the tradition of British common sense philosophy that Moore had revived and made him one of the godfathers of the ordinary language philosophy that was to flourish in Oxford in the 0s. In the Philosophical Investigations Vitters emphasized that there are countless different uses of what we call “symbols,” “words,” and “sentences.” The task of philosophy is to gain a perspicuous view of those multiple uses and thereby to dissolve philosophical and metaphysical puzzles. These puzzles were the result of insufficient attention to the working of language and could be resolved only by carefully retracing the linguistic steps by which they had been reached. Vitters thus came to think of philosophy as a descriptive, analytic, and ultimately therapeutic practice. In the Investigations he set out to show how common philosophical views about meaning including the logical atomism of the Tractatus, about the nature of concepts, about logical necessity, about rule-following, and about the mindbody problem were all the product of an insufficient grasp of how language works. In one of the most influential passages of the book he argued that concept words do not denote sharply circumscribed concepts, but are meant to mark family resemblances between the things labeled with the concept. He also held that logical necessity results from linguistic convention and that rules cannot determine their own applications, that rule-following presupposes the existence of regular practices. Furthermore, the words of our language have meaning only insofar as there exist public criteria for their correct application. As a consequence, he argued, there cannot be a completely private language, i.e., a language that in principle can be used only to speak about one’s own inner experience. This private language argument has caused much discussion. Interpreters have disagreed not only over the structure of the argument and where it occurs in Vitters’s text, but also over the question whether he meant to say that language is necessarily social. Because he said that to speak of inner experiences there must be external and publicly available criteria, he has often been taken to be advocating a logical behaviorism, but nowhere does he, in fact, deny the existence of inner states. What he says is merely that our understanding of someone’s pain is connected to the existence of natural and linguistic expressions of pain. In the Philosophical Investigations Vitters repeatedly draws attention to the fact that language must be learned. This learning, he says, is fundamentally a process of inculcation and drill. In learning a language the child is initiated in a form of life. In Vitters’s later work the notion of form of life serves to identify the whole complex of natural and cultural circumstances presupposed by our language and by a particular understanding of the world. He elaborated those ideas in notes on which he worked between 8 and his death in 1 and which are now published under the title On Certainty. He insisted in them that every belief is always part of a system of beliefs that together constitute a worldview. All confirmation and disconfirmation of a belief presuppose such a system and are internal to the system. For all this he was not advocating a relativism, but a naturalism that assumes that the world ultimately determines which language games can be played. Vitters’s final notes vividly illustrate the continuity of his basic concerns throughout all the changes his thinking went through. For they reveal once more how he remained skeptical about all philosophical theories and how he understood his own undertaking as the attempt to undermine the need for any such theorizing. The considerations of On Certainty are evidently directed against both philosophical skeptics and those philosophers who want to refute skepticism. Against the philosophical skeptics Vitters insisted that there is real knowledge, but this knowledge is always dispersed and not necessarily reliable; it consists of things we have heard and read, of what has been drilled into us, and of our modifications of this inheritance. We have no general reason to doubt this inherited body of knowledge, we do not generally doubt it, and we are, in fact, not in a position to do so. But On Certainty also argues that it is impossible to refute skepticism by pointing to propositions that are absolutely certain, as Descartes did when he declared ‘I think, therefore I am’ indubitable, or as Moore did when he said, “I know for certain that this is a hand here.” The fact that such propositions are considered certain, Vitters argued, indicates only that they play an indispensable, normative role in our language game; they are the riverbed through which the thought of our language game flows. Such propositions cannot be taken to express metaphysical truths. Here, too, the conclusion is that all philosophical argumentation must come to an end, but that the end of such argumentation is not an absolute, self-evident truth, but a certain kind of natural human practice. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Il gesto della mano di Sraffa.” Speranza, “Sraffa’s handwave, and his impicaturum.”

wodeham: “If Adam of Wodeham was called Wodeham, I should, by the same token, be called “Harborne”” – H. P. Grice. Oxonian philosopher, like Grice. Adam de English Franciscan philosopher-theologian who lectured on Peter Lombard’s Sentences at London, Norwich, and Oxford. His published works include the Tractatus de indivisibilibus; his Lectura secunda Norwich lectures; and an abbreviation of his Oxford lectures by Henry Totting of Oyta, published by John Major in 1512. Wodeham’s main work, the Oxford lectures, themselves remain unpublished. A brilliant interpreter of Duns Scotus, whose original manuscripts he consulted, Wodeham deemed Duns Scotus the greatest Franciscan doctor. William Ockham, Wodeham’s teacher, was the other great influence on Wodeham’s philosophical theology. Wodeham defended Ockham’s views against attacks mounted by Walter Chatton; he also wrote the prologue to Ockham’s Summa logicae. Wodeham’s own influence rivaled that of Ockham. Among the authors he strongly influenced are Gregory of Rimini, John of Mirecourt, Nicholas of Autrecourt, Pierre d’Ailly, Peter Ceffons, Alfonso Vargas, Peter of Candia Alexander V, Henry Totting of Oyta, and John Major. Wodeham’s theological works were written for an audience with a very sophisticated understanding of current issues in semantics, logic, and medieval mathematical physics. Contrary to Duns Scotus and Ockham, Wodeham argued that the sensitive and intellective souls were not distinct. He further develops the theory of intuitive cognition, distinguishing intellectual intuition of our own acts of intellect, will, and memory from sensory intuition of external objects. Scientific knowledge based on experience can be based on intuition, according to Wodeham. He distinguishes different grades of evidence, and allows that sensory perceptions may be mistaken. Nonetheless, they can form the basis for scientific knowledge, since they are reliable; mistakes can be corrected by reason and experience. In semantic theory, Wodeham defends the view that the immediate object of scientific knowledge is the complexe significabile, that which the conclusion is designed to signify. 

wolff: cited by H. P. Grice, c. philosopher and the most powerful advocate for secular rationalism in early eighteenth-century G.y. Although he was a Lutheran, his early education in Catholic Breslau made him familiar with both the Scholasticism of Aquinas and Suárez and more modern sources. His later studies at Leipzig were completed with a dissertation on the application of mathematical methods to ethics 1703, which brought him to the attention of Leibniz. He remained in correspondence with Leibniz until the latter’s death 1716, and became known as the popularizer of Leibniz’s philosophy, although his views did not derive from that source alone. Appointed to teach mathematics in Halle in 1706 he published mathematical textbooks and compendia that dominated G. universities for decades, Wolff began lecturing on philosophy as well by 1709. His rectoral address On the Practical Philosophy of the Chin. argued that revelation and even belief in God were unnecessary for arriving at sound principles of moral and political reasoning; this brought his uneasy relations with the Halle Pietists to a head, and in 1723 they secured his dismissal and indeed banishment. Wolff was immediately welcomed in Marburg, where he became a hero for freedom of thought, and did not return to Prussia until the ascension of Frederick the Great in 1740, when he resumed his post at Halle. Wolff published an immense series of texts on logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, natural theology, and teleology, in which he created the philosophical terminology of modern G.; he then published an even more extensive series of works in Latin for the rest of his life, expanding and modifying his G. works but also adding works on natural and positive law and economics. He accepted the traditional division of logic into the doctrines of concepts, judgment, and inference, which influenced the organization of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and even Hegel’s Science of Logic1816. In metaphysics, he included general ontology and then the special disciplines of rational cosmology, rational psychology, and rational theology Kant replaced Wolff’s general ontology with his transcendental aesthetic and analytic, and then demolished Wolff’s special metaphysics in his transcendental dialectic. Wolff’s metaphysics drew heavily on Leibniz, but also on Descartes and even empiricists like Locke. Methodologically, he attempted to derive the principle of sufficient reason from the logical law of identity like the unpublished Leibniz of the 1680s rather than the published Leibniz of the 1700s; substantively, he began his G. metaphysics with a reconstruction of Descartes’s cogito argument, then argued for a simple, immaterial soul, all of its faculties reducible to forms of representation and related to body by preestablished harmony. Although rejected by Crusius and then Kant, Wolff’s attempt to found philosophy on a single principle continued to influence G. idealism as late as Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel, and his example of beginning metaphysics from the unique representative power of the soul continued to influence not only later writers such as Reinhold and Fichte but also Kant’s own conception of the transcendental unity of apperception. In spite of the academic influence of his metaphysics, Wolff’s importance for G. culture lay in his rationalist rather than theological ethics. He argued that moral worth lies in the perfection of the objective essence of mankind; as the essence of a human is to be an intellect and a will with the latter dependent on the former, which are physically embodied and dependent for their well-being on the well-being of their physical body, morality requires perfection of the intellect and will, physical body, and external conditions for the well-being of that combination. Each person is obliged to perfect all instantiations of this essence, but in practice does so most effectively in his own case; duties to oneself therefore precede duties to others and to God. Because pleasure is the sensible sign of perfection, Wolff’s perfectionism resembles contemporary utilitarianism. Since he held that human perfection can be understood by human reason independently of any revelation, Wolff joined contemporary British enlighteners such as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in arguing that morality does not depend on divine commands, indeed the recognition of divine commands depends on an antecedent comprehension of morality although morality does require respect for God, and thus the atheistic morality of the Chin., even though sound as far as it went, was not complete. This was the doctrine that put Wolff’s life in danger, but it had tremendous repercussions for the remainder of his century, and certainly in Kant. H. P. Grice, “Psychologia ratioalis.”

wollaston: w. cited by H. P. Grice. English moralist notorious for arguing that the immorality of actions lies in their implying false propositions. An assistant headmaster who later took priestly orders, Wollaston maintains in his one published work, The Religion of Nature Delineated 1722, that the foundations of religion and morality are mutually dependent. God has preestablished a harmony between reason or truth and happiness, so that actions that contradict truth through misrepresentation thereby frustrate human happiness and are thus evil. For instance, if a person steals another’s watch, her falsely representing the watch as her own makes the act wrong. Wollaston’s views, particularly his taking morality to consist in universal and necessary truths, were influenced by the rationalists Ralph Cudworth and Clarke. Among his many critics the most famous was Hume, who contends that Wollaston’s theory implies an absurdity: any action concealed from public view e.g., adultery conveys no false proposition and therefore is not immoral. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why bother with Wollaston?” BANC.

wollstonecraft, M, author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Somerville,” a central text of Oxonian feminist philosophy. Wollstonecraft’s chief target is Rousseau: her goal is to argue against the separate and different education Rousseau provided for girls and to extend his recommendations to girls as well as boys. Wollstonecraft saw such an improved education for women as necessary to their asserting their right as “human creatures” to develop their faculties in a way conducive to human virtue. She also wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men 1790, an attack on Edmund Burke’s pamphlet on the  Revolution, as well as novels, essays, an account of her travels, and books for children. 

wright: philosopher. His philosophical discussions are stimulating and attracted many, including Peirce, James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who thinks of him as their “intellectual boxing master.” Wright eventually accepted empiricism, especially that of J. S. Mill, though under Darwinian influence he modified Mill’s view considerably by rejecting the empiricist claim that general propositions merely summarize particulars. Wright claims instead that scientific theories are hypotheses to be further developed, and insisted that a moral rule is irreducible and needs no utilitarian “proof.” Though he denied the “summary” view of universals, he is not strictly a pragmatist, since for him a low-level empirical proposition like Peirce’s ‘this diamond is hard’ is not a hypothesis but a self-contained irreducible statement.  

wundt: proto-Griceian philosophical psychologist. philosopher that Grice, who calls himself a ‘philosophical psychologist,’ often quotes. “As the founder of scientific psychology, Wundt was influential in my embracing ‘philosophical psychology,’ as a revenge.” Although trained as a physician (“like Vitters”), Wundt turns to philosophy and in Leipzig’s downtown established the first recognized psychology laboratory. For Wundt, psychology deals with conscious experience, a definition soon overtaken by Ryle’s behaviourism. Wundt’s psychology has two departments: the so-called physiological psychology (Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie, Grice preferred ‘philosophical physiology’), primarily the experimental study of immediate experience broadly modeled on Fechner’s psycho-physics; and the Volkerpsychologie (Volkerpsychologie, -- or ‘folkpsychology,’ as Grice prefers – ‘philosohical psychology is a folk-science’ -- which circulated at Oxford as “The Language of Gestures,” the non-experimental study of the higher mental processes via their products, conversation, language, myth, and custom. Although Wundt is a prodigious investigator and author, and was revered as psychology’s founder, his theories, unlike his methods, exerted little influence, except on Grice and a few intelligent Griceians. A typical scholar of his time, Wundt, like Grice, also explored across the whole of philosophy, including logic and ethics. W. M. philosopher and psychologist, a founder of scientific psychology. Although trained as a physician, he turned to philosophy and in 1879, at the  of Leipzig, established the first recognized psychology laboratory. For Wundt, psychology was the science of conscious experience, a definition soon overtaken by behaviorism. Wundt’s psychology had two departments: the so-called physiological psychology Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie, 3 vols., 1873 74; only vol. 1 of the fifth edition, 0, was tr. into English, primarily the experimental study of immediate experience broadly modeled on Fechner’s psychophysics; and the Volkerpsychologie Volkerpsychologie, 10 vols., 020; fragment tr. as The Language of Gestures, 3, the non-experimental study of the higher mental processes via their products, language, myth, and custom. Although Wundt was a prodigious investigator and author, and was revered as psychology’s founder, his theories, unlike his methods, exerted little influence. A typical G. scholar of his time, he also wrote across the whole of philosophy, including logic and ethics. .

wyclif: “It never ceased to amaze me how Wyclif was able to find Anglo-Saxon terms for all the “Biblia Vulgata”!” – H. P. Grice. English Griceian philosophical theologian and religious reformer. He worked for most of his life in Oxford as a secular clerk, teaching philosophy and later theology and writing extensively in both fields. The mode of thought expressed in his surviving works is one of extreme realism, and in this his thought fostered the split of Bohemian, later Hussite, philosophy from that of the G. masters teaching in Prague. His worldline Wyclif, John 982   982 philosophical summa was most influential for his teaching on universals, but also dealt extensively with the question of determinism; these issues underlay his later handling of the questions of the Eucharist and of the identity of the church respectively. His influence on English philosophy was severely curtailed by the growing hostility of the church to his ideas, the condemnation of many of his tenets, the persecution of his followers, and the destruction of his writings.

qu-quaestio -- x-question: Grice borrowed the erotetic from Cook Wilson, who in fact was influenced by Stout and will also influence Collingwood. While Grice starts by considering the pseudo-distinction between x-questions and yes/no questions, he soon finds out that they all reduce to the x-question, since a yes/no question obviously asks for a variable (the truth value of the whole proposition) to be filled. Grice sometimes follows Ryle who had quoted Carnap on the ‘w  frage.’ Grice is aware of the ‘wh’ rune in Anglo-Saxon, but was confused by ‘how.’ “For fun, I will spell ‘how,’ ‘whow.’” Although a Midlander Grice preferred the northern English pronunciation of aspirating the ‘wh-‘ and was irritated that only ‘who’ and ‘whose’ keep the aspiration.

xenophanes: Grice: “You have to be careful when you research for this in Italy – they spell it with an ‘s’!” --  Grecian philosopher, a proponent of an idealized conception of the divine, and the first of the pre-Socratics to propound epistemological views. Born in Colophon, an Ionian Grecian city on the coast of Asia Minor, he emigrated as a young man to the Grecian West Sicily and southern Italy. The formative influence of the Milesians is evident in his rationalism. He is the first of the pre-Socratics for whom we have not only ancient reports but also quite a few verbatim quotations  fragments from his “Lampoons” Silloi and from other didactic poetry. Xenophanes attacks the worldview of Homer, Hesiod, and traditional Grecian piety: it is an outrage that the poets attribute moral failings to the gods. Traditional religion reflects regional biases blond gods for the Northerners; black gods for the Africans. Indeed, anthropomorphic gods reflect the ultimate bias, that of the human viewpoint “If cattle, or horses, or lions . . . could draw pictures of the gods . . . ,” frg. 15. There is a single “greatest” god, who is not at all like a human being, either in body or in mind; he perceives without the aid of organs, he effects changes without “moving,” through the sheer power of his thought. The rainbow is no sign from Zeus; it is simply a special cloud formation. Nor are the sun or the moon gods. All phenomena in the skies, from the elusive “Twin Sons of Zeus” St. Elmo’s fire to sun, moon, and stars, are varieties of cloud formation. There are no mysterious infernal regions; the familiar strata of earth stretch down ad infinitum. The only cosmic limit is the one visible at our feet: the horizontal border between earth and air. Remarkably, Xenophanes tempers his theological and cosmological pronouncements with an epistemological caveat: what he offers is only a “conjecture.” In later antiquity Xenophanes came to be regarded as the founder of the Eleatic School, and his teachings were assimilated to those of Parmenides and Melissus. This appears to be based on nothing more than Xenophanes’ emphasis on the oneness and utter immobility of God.

xenophon: Grice: “You have to be carefully when researching for this philosopher in Italy – They spell it ‘Senofonte’ Grecian soldier and historian, author of several Socratic dialogues, along with important works on history, education, political theory, and other topics. He was interested in philosophy, and he was a penetrating and intelligent “social thinker” whose views on morality and society have been influential over many centuries. His perspective on Socrates’ character and moral significance provides a valuable supplement and corrective to the better-known views of Plato. Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues, the only ones besides Plato’s to survive intact, help us obtain a broader picture of the Socratic dialogue as a literary genre. They also provide precious evidence concerning the thoughts and personalities of other followers of Socrates, such as Antisthenes and Alcibiades. Xenophon’s longest and richest Socratic work is the Memorabilia, or “Memoirs of Socrates,” which stresses Socrates’ self-sufficiency and his beneficial effect on his companions. Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates and his Symposium were probably intended as responses to Plato’s Apology and Symposium. Xenophon’s Socratic dialogue on estate management, the Oeconomicus, is valuable for its underlying social theory and its evidence concerning the role and status of women in classical Athens. Refs.: Speranza, “All you need is Loeb,” Villa Grice.

yes/no question – “sic” et “ne” – modus interrogativus. Grice: “Cicero has this as ‘sic’ and ‘non.’ For Grice, tertium non datur. Grice’s example is “Have you stopped beating  your wife, Smith?” “Smith is tricked into having to say ‘yes,’ which makes him a criminal, or “no,” which doesn’t but *implicates* him in a crime.” “The explicit cancellation would be, “No, because I never started it.” – “But usually Smith is never so intelligently Griceian like *that*! Vide: modus interrogatives.  Grice finds the formalisation of a yes-no question more complicated than that of an x-question. Like Carnap, he concludes that the distinction is otiose, because a yes/no question also is after a variable to be filled by a definite value, regarding the truth-value of the proposition as a whole rather than a part thereof. Grice: “While I’ll casually use ‘yes,’ I’m well aware that the ‘s,’ as every German schoolboy knows, is otiose – it’s ‘yeah’ which is the correct form!” -- Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Cicero on ‘sic’ and ‘ne’.” BANC, Speranza, “First time in Corpus?”

yog and zog: “If” (Cicero’s ‘si’) is a problem for Grice. “Especially in it being the only subordinate particle I have seriously explored.” According to Strawson and Wiggins, this was Grice having forged his shining new tool – the distinction between ‘By emitting x, An emissor coomunicates that p” and “The emissum x ‘means’ ‘p.’ Apply that to ‘if.’ In Strawson and Wiggins’s precis, for Grice, ‘p yields q’ is part of the conversational implicaturum – for Strawson and Wiggins it is part of the conventional implicaturum. They agree on ‘p  horseshoe q’ being the explicit emissum or explicatum in “Emissor explicitly conveys and communicates that p horseshoe q.” For Grice, the implicaturum, which, being conversational is cancellable, is calculated on the assumption that the addressee can work out that the emissor has non-truth-functional grounds for the making of any stronger claim. For Strawson, that non-truth-functional reason is precisely ‘p yields q,’ which leads Strawson to think that the thing is not cancellable and conventionally implicated. If Strawson were right that this is Grice forging a new shining tool to crack the crib of reality and fashioning thereby a new shining skid under his metaphysical feet, it would be almost the second use of the tool!  This is an expansion by Grice on the implicaturum of a ‘propositio conditionalis.’ Grice, feeling paradoxical, invites us to suppose a scenario involving ‘if.’ He takes it as a proof that his account of the conversational implicaturum of ‘if’ is, as Strawson did not agree, correct, and that what an utterer explicitly conveys by ‘if p, q’ is ‘p > q.’  that two chess players, Yog and Zog, play 100 games under the following conditions. Yog is white nine of ten times. There are no draws.  And the results are:  Yog, when white, won 80 of 90 games. Yog, when black, won zero of ten games.  This implies that:  8/9 times, if Yog was white, Yog won. 1/2 of the time, if Yog lost, Yog was black.  9/10 that either Yog wasnt white or he won.  From these statements, it might appear one could make these deductions by contraposition and conditional disjunction: If Yog was white, then 1/2 of the time Yog won. 9/10 times, if Yog was white, then he won.  But both propositions are untrue. They contradict the assumption. In fact, they do not provide enough information to use Bayesian reasoning to reach those conclusions. That might be clearer if the propositions had instead been stated differently. When Yog was white, Yog won 8/9 times. No information is given about when Yog was black. When Yog lost, Yog was black 1/2 the time. No information is given about when Yog won. (9/10 times, either Yog was black and won, Yog was black and lost, or Yog was white and won. No information is provided on how the 9/10 is divided among those three situations. The paradox by Grice shows that the exact meaning of statements involving conditionals and probabilities is more complicated than may be obvious on casual examination. Refs.: Grice’s interest with ‘if’ surely started after he carefully read the section on ‘if’ and the horseshoe in Strawson’s Introduction to Logical Theory. He was later to review his attack on Strawson in view of Strawson’s defense in ‘If and the horseshoe.’ The polemic was pretty much solved as a matter of different intuitions: what Grice sees as a conversational implicaturum, Strawson does see as an ‘implicaturum,’ but a non-defeasible one – what Grice would qualify as ‘conventional.’ Grice leaves room for an implicaturum to be nonconversational and yet nonconventional, but it is not worth trying to fit Strawson’s suggestion in this slot, since Strawson, unlike Grice, has nothing against a convention. Grice was motivated to formulate his ‘paradox,’ seeing that Strawson was saying that the so-called ‘paradoxes’ of ‘entailment’ and ‘implication’ are a misnomer. “They are not paradoxical; they are false!” Grice has specific essays on both the paradoxes of entailment and the paradoxes of implication-. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The University of California, Berkeley.

zabarella: Grice: “Zabarella is what I would call a proto-Griceain.” In fact, at Villa Grice, Grice was often called the English Zabarella, after philosopher Jacopo Zabarella, of Padova. Zabarella produces extensive commentaries on Grice’s favourite tract by Aristotle, “De Anima,” and Physica and also discussed some Aristotelian interpreters. However, Zabarella’s most original contribution is his work in semantics, “Opera logica.” Zabarella regards semantics as a preliminary study that provides the tools necessary for philosophical analysis. Two such tools are what Zabarella calls “order” (cf. Grice, ‘be orderly’). Another tool is what Zabarella calls “ method.” Order teaches us how to organize the content of a discipline to apprehend it more easily. Method teaches us how to draw a syllogistic inference. Zabarella reduces the varieties of orders and methods classified by other interpreters to compositive order, and resolutive order, and composite method and and resolutive method. The compositive order from a principle to this or that corollary applies to this or that speculative, alethic or theoretical discipline. The ‘resolutive’ order, from a desired end to the means appropriate to its achievement applies to this or that practical discipline, such as ‘pragmatics’ understood as a manual of rules of etiquette. This much is already in Aristotle. However, Zabarella offers an original analysis of ‘method.’ The compositive method infers a particular consequence or corollary from a ‘generic’ principle. The ‘resolutive’ method INFERS an originating gneric principle from this or that particular consequence, corollary, or instantiantion, as in inductive reasoning or in reasoning from effect to cause. Zabarella’s terminology influenced Galileo’s mechanics, and has been applied to Grice’s inference of the principle of conversational co-operation out from the only evidence which Grice has, which is this or that ‘dyadic’ exchange, as he calls it. In Grice’s case, his corpus is intentionally limited to conversations between two philosophers: A: What’s that? B: A pillar box? A: What colour is it? B: Seems red to me. From such an exchange, Grice infers the principle of conversational co-operation. It clashes when a cancellation (or as Grice prefers, an annulation) is on sight: “I surely don’t mean to imply that it MIGHT actually be red.” “Then why be so guarded? I thought you were cooperating.”H. P. Grice. “We can regard Jacopo as an Aristotelian philosopher who taught at the  of Padua. He wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and On the Soul and also discussed other interpreters such as Averroes. However, his most original contribution was his work in logic, Opera logica 1578. Zabarella regards logic as a preliminary study that provides the tools necessary for philosophical analysis. Two such tools are order and method: order teaches us how to organize the content of a discipline to apprehend it more easily; method teaches us how to draw syllogistic inferences. Zabarella reduces the varieties of orders and methods classified by other interpreters to compositive and resolutive orders and methods. The compositive order from first principles to their consequences applies to theoretical disciplines. The resolutive order from a desired end to means appropriate to its achievement applies to practical disciplines. This much was already in Aristotle. Zabarella offers an original analysis of method. The compositive method infers particular consequences from general principles. The resolutive method infers originating principles from particular consequences, as in inductive reasoning or in reasoning from effect to cause. It has been suggested that Zabarella’s terminology might have influenced Galileo’s mechanics. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Zabarella,” Speranza, “Grice and Zabarella,” Villa Grice.

zeigarnik effect: ‘Conversation as a compete task and the Zeigmaik effect’ -- H. P. Grice. the selective recall of uncompleted tasks in comparison to completed tasks. The effect was named for Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of K. Lewin, who discovered it and described it in a paper published in the Psychologische Forschung in 7. Subjects received an array of short tasks, such as counting backward and stringing beads, for rapid completion. Performance on half of these was interrupted. Subsequent recall for the tasks favored the interrupted tasks. Zeigarnik concluded that recall is influenced by motivation and not merely associational strength. The effect was thought relevant to Freud’s claim that unfulfilled wishes are persistent. Lewin attempted to derive the effect from field theory, suggesting that an attempt to reach a goal creates a tension released only when that goal is reached; interruption of the attempt produces a tension favoring recall. Conditions affecting the Zeigarnik effect are incompletely understood, as is its significance. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Conversation as a complete task and the Zeigmarnik effect.” BANC

zeno – Italian philosopher, as as such, or as Grice prefers, ‘senone’ -- Zenos paradoxes. “Since Elea is in Italy, we can say Zeno is Italian.” – H. P. Grice. “Linguistic puzzles, in nature.”  H. P. Grice. four paradoxes relating to space and motion attributed to Zeno of Elea fifth century B.C.: the racetrack, Achilles and the tortoise, the stadium, and the arrow. Zeno’s work is known to us through secondary sources, in particular Aristotle. The racetrack paradox. If a runner is to reach the end of the track, he must first complete an infinite number of different journeys: getting to the midpoint, then to the point midway between the midpoint and the end, then to the point midway between this one and the end, and so on. But it is logically impossible for someone to complete an infinite series of journeys. Therefore the runner cannot reach the end of the track. Since it is irrelevant to the argument how far the end of the track is  it could be a foot or an inch or a micron away  this argument, if sound, shows that all motion is impossible. Moving to any point will involve an infinite number of journeys, and an infinite number of journeys cannot be completed. The paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles can run much faster than the tortoise, so when a race is arranged between them the tortoise is given a lead. Zeno argued that Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise no matter how fast he runs and no matter how long the race goes on. For the first thing Achilles has to do is to get to the place from which the tortoise started. But the tortoise, though slow, is unflagging: while Achilles was occupied in making up his handicap, the tortoise has advanced a little farther. So the next thing Achilles has to do is to get to the new place the tortoise occupies. While he is doing this, the tortoise will have gone a little farther still. However small the gap that remains, it will take Achilles some time to cross it, and in that time the tortoise will have created another gap. So however fast Achilles runs, all that the tortoise has to do, in order not to be beaten, is not to stop. The stadium paradox. Imagine three equal cubes, A, B, and C, with sides all of length l, arranged in a line stretching away from one. A is moved perpendicularly out of line to the right by a distance equal to l. At the same time, and at the same rate, C is moved perpendicularly out of line to the left by a distance equal to l. The time it takes A to travel l/2 relative to B equals the time it takes A to travel to l relative to C. So, in Aristotle’s words, “it follows, Zeno thinks, that half the time equals its double” Physics 259b35. The arrow paradox. At any instant of time, the flying arrow “occupies a space equal to itself.” That is, the arrow at an instant cannot be moving, for motion takes a period of time, and a temporal instant is conceived as a point, not itself having duration. It follows that the arrow is at rest at every instant, and so does not move. What goes for arrows goes for everything: nothing moves. Scholars disagree about what Zeno himself took his paradoxes to show. There is no evidence that he offered any “solutions” to them. One view is that they were part of a program to establish that multiplicity is an illusion, and that reality is a seamless whole. The argument could be reconstructed like this: if you allow that reality can be successively divided into parts, you find yourself with these insupportable paradoxes; so you must think of reality as a single indivisible One.  Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Zeno’s sophisma;” Luigi Speranza, "Senone e Grice," The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

zettel: Grice entitled his further notes on logic and conversation, “zettel” – “What’s good enough for Vitters is good enough for me.” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Conversation: Zettel,” BANC.

zoroastrianism: H. P. Grice wrote, “Thus Implicated Zarahustra,” the national religion of ancient Iran. Zoroastrianism suffered a steep decline after the seventh century A.D. because of conversion to Islam. Of a remnant of roughly 100,000 adherents today, three-fourths are Parsis “Persians” in or from western India; the others are Iranian Zoroastrians. The tradition is identified with its prophet; his name in Persian, Zarathushtra, is preserved in G. and Griceian, but the ancient Grecian rendering of that name, Zoroaster, is the form used in most other modern European languages. Zoroaster’s hymns to Ahura Mazda “the Wise Lord”, called the Gathas, are interspersed among ritual hymns to other divine powers in the collection known as the Avesta. In them, Zoroaster seeks reassurance that good will ultimately triumph over evil and that Ahura Mazda will be a protector to him in his prophetic mission. The Gathas expect that humans, by aligning themselves with the force of righteousness and against evil, will receive bliss and benefit in the next existence. The dating of the texts and of the prophet himself is an elusive matter for scholars, but it is clear that Zoroaster lived somewhere in Iran sometime prior to the emergence of the Achaemenid empire in the sixth century B.C. His own faith in Ahura Mazda, reflected in the Gathas, came to be integrated with other strains of old Indo-Iranian religion. We see these in the Avesta’s hymns and the religion’s ritual practices. They venerate an array of Iranian divine powers that resemble in function the deities found in the Vedas of India. A common Indo-Iranian heritage is indicated conclusively by similarities of language and of content between the Avesta and the Vedas. Classical Zoroastrian orthodoxy does not replace the Indo-Iranian divinities with Ahura Mazda, but instead incorporates them into its thinking more or less as Ahura Mazda’s agents. The Achaemenid kings from the sixth through the fourth centuries B.C. mention Ahura Mazda in their inscriptions, but not Zoroaster. The Parthians, from the third century B.C. to the third century A.D., highlighted Mithra among the Indo-Iranian pantheon. But it was under the Sasanians, who ruled Iran from the third to the seventh centuries, that Zoroastrianism became the established religion. A salient doctrine is the teaching concerning the struggle between good and evil. The time frame from the world’s creation to the final resolution or judgment finds the Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda or Ohrmazd, in the Pahlavi language of Sasanian times, locked in a struggle with the evil spirit, Angra Mainyu in Pahlavi, Ahriman. The teaching expands on an implication in the text of the Gathas, particularly Yasna 30, that the good and evil spirits, coming together in the beginning and establishing the living and inanimate realms, determined that at the end benefit would accrue to the righteous but not the wicked. In Sasanian times, there was speculative concern to assert Ahura Mazda’s infinity, omnipotence, and omniscience, qualities that may indicate an impact of Mediterranean philosophy. For example, the Bundahishn, a Pahlavi cosmological and eschatological narrative, portrays Ahura Mazda as infinite in all four compass directions but the evil spirit as limited in one and therefore doomed to ultimate defeat. Such doctrine has been termed by some dualistic, in that it has at least in Sasanian times seen the power of God rivaled by that of an evil spirit. Zoroastrians today assert that they are monotheists, and do not worship the evil spirit. But to the extent that the characterization may hold historically, Zoroastrianism has manifested an “ethical” dualism, of good and evil forces. Although capable of ritual pollution through waste products and decay, the physical world, God’s creation, remains potentially morally good. Contrast “ontological” dualism, as in gnostic and Manichaean teaching, where the physical world itself is the result of the fall or entrapment of spirit in matter. In the nineteenth century, Zoroastrian texts newly accessible to Europe produced an awareness of the prophet’s concern for ethical matters. Nietzsche’s values in his work Thus Spake Zarathustra, however, are his own, not those of the ancient prophet. The title is arresting, but the connection of Nietzsche with historical Zoroastrianism is a connection in theme only, in that the work advances ideas about good and evil in an oracular style. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Nietzsche’s implicatura,” BANC.

zweckrationalität: Grice: “What I like about Weber’s ‘zweckrationalitaet’ is that it’s one of the latter items in my dictionary!” -- Grice: “I’m slightly confused by Weber, who was hardly a philosopher, and his use of ‘zweck,’ – which Kant would have disliked. H. P. Grice used the vernacular here, since he found it tricky to look for the Oxonian for ‘Zweck.’ As he was reading Weber, Grice realises that one of the main theoretical goals of Weber’s work is to understand how a social process (such as a conversation, seen as a two-player game) become “rationalized,” taking up certain themes of philosophy of history since Hegel as part of social theory. Conversation, as part of culture, e.g., becomes ‘rationalised’ in the process of the “disenchantment of a world views” in the West, a process that Weber thinks has “universal significance.” But because of his goal-oriented theory of action and his non-cognitivism in ethics, Weber sees rationalization, like Grice, and unlike, say, Habermas, exclusively in terms of the spread of purposive, or MEANS–ends rationality (“Zweckrationalität”). Rational action means choosing the most effective MEANS of achieving one’s goals and implies judging the consequences of one’s actions and choices. In contrast, value rationality (“Wertrationalität,” that Grice translates as ‘worth-rationality’) consists of any action oriented to this or that ultimate END, where considerations of consequences are irrelevant. Although such action is rational insofar as it directs and organises human conduct, the choice of this or that end, or this or that value itself cannot be, for Weber, unlike Grice, a matter for rational or scientific judgment. Indeed, for Weber this means that politics is the sphere for the struggle between at least two of this or that irreducibly competing ultimate end, where “gods and demons fight it out” and charismatic leaders invent new gods and values. Grice tries to look for a way to give a criterion of rationality other than the ‘common-or-garden’ means-end variety. When it comes to conversation, see, Speranza, “The feast of [conversational] reason – Grice’s Conversational immanuel – three steps towards a critique of conversational reason.” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Conversational rationality,” in The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, The University of California, Berkeley.

References (Following the tradition of H. P. Grice’s Playgroup, only Oxonian English-born male philosophers of Grice’s generation listed)

Austin, J. L. Philosophical papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Austin, J. L. Sense and sensibilia, reconstructed from manuscript notes by G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Austin, J. L. How to do things with words, ed. by J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Blackburn, S. W. Spreading the word. Oxford.

Bostock, D. Logic.

Flew, A. G. N. Logic and language. Oxford: Blackwell.

Grice, H. P. Studies in the Way of Words

Grice, H. P. Negation and privation

Grice, H. P. The conception of value. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.

Grice, H. P. Aspects of reason, Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.

Grice, H. P., D. F. Pears, and P. F. Strawson, ‘Metaphysics,’ in D. F. Pears, The nature of metaphysics. London: Macmillan.

Hampshire, S. N. Thought and action. London: Chatto and Windus.

Hampshire, S. N. and H. L. A. Hart, Intention, decision, and certainty. Mind.

Hare, R. M. The language of morals. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press.

Hart, H. L. A. Review of Holloway, The Philosophical Quarterly

Nowell-Smith, P. H. Ethics. Middlesex: Penguin

Pears, D. F. Philosophical psychology. London: Duckworth.

Pears, D. F. Motivated irrationality.

Pears, D. F. and H. P. Grice, The philosophy of action.

Speranza, Minutes of H. P. Grice’s Play-Group – The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

Strawson, P. F. Introduction to Logical Theory.

Strawson, P. F. Logico-Linguistic Papers.

Strawson, P. F. and H. P. Grice, In defense of a dogma.

Strawson, P. F. and H. P. Grice, Categories

Strawson, P. F. and H. P. Grice, Meaning.

Thomson, J. F. and H. P. Grice, The philosophy of action.

Urmson, J. O. Philosophical Analysis: its development between the two wars.

Warnock, G. J. The object of morality

Warnock, G. J. Language and Morals

Woozley, A. D. On H. P. Grice. – A. M. G. is Anna Maria Ghersi – Ghersi instilled and keeps instilling – never ceases to instill -- in Luigi Speranza a love for philosophy.