IMPLICATVRA -- in 18 volumes, vol. XII

locke. Grice cites Locke in “Personal identity,” and many more places. He has a premium for Locke. Acceptance, acceptance and certeris paribus condition, acceptance and modals, j-acceptance, moral acceptance, prudential acceptance, v-acceptance, ackrill, Aristotle, Austin, botvinnik , categorical imperative, chicken soul, immortality of, Davidson, descriptivism, descriptivism and ends, aequi-vocality thesis, final cause, frege, happiness, happiness and H-desirables, happiness and I-desirables, happiness as a system of ends, happiness as an end, hardie, hypothetical imperative , hypothetical imperative -- see technical imperatives, isaacson, incontinence, inferential principles, judging, judging and acceptance, Kant, logical theory, meaning, meaning and speech procedures, sentence meaning, what a speaker means, modes, modes and moods, moods, modes and embedding of mode-markers , judicative operator, volitive operator, mood operators, moods morality, myro, nagel, necessity, necessity and provability, necessity and relativized and absolute modalities, principle of total evidence, principles of inference, principles of inference, reasons, and necessity, provability, radical, rationality : as faculty manifested in reasoning, flat and variable, proto-rationality, rational being, and value as value-paradigmatic concept, rationality operator, reasonable, reasoning, reasoning and defeasibility, reasoning defined, rasoning and explanation, reasoning -- first account of, reasoning and good reasoning, reasoning, special status of, reasoning the hard way of, reasoning and incomplete reasoning, reasoning and indeterminacy of, reasoning and intention, reasoning and misreasoning, reasoning, practical, reasoning, probabilistic, reasoning as purposive activity, reasoning, the quick way of , reasoning -- too good to be reasoning, reasons, reasons altheic, reasons: division into practical and alethic, reasons: explanatory, reasons justificatory, reasons: justificatory-explanatory, reasoning and modals, reasoning and necessity, personal, practical and non-practical (alethic) reasons compared, systematizing hypothesis: types of, Russell, satisfactoriness, technical imperatives, value, value paradigmatic concepts, Wright, willing and acceptance, Vitters. Index acceptance 71-2 , 80-7 and certeris paribus condition 77 and modals 91-2 J-acceptance 51 moral 61 , 63 , 87 prudential 97-111 V-acceptance 51 Ackrill, J. L. 119-20 Aristotle 4-5 , 19 , 24-5 , 31 , 32 , 43 , 98-9 , 112-15 , 120 , 125 Austin, J. L. 99 Botvinnik 11 , 12 , 18 Categorical Imperative 4 , 70 chicken soul, immortality of 11-12 Davidson, Donald 45-8 , 68 descriptivism 92 ends 100-10 Equivocality thesis x-xv , 58 , 62 , 66 , 70 , 71 , 80 , 90 final cause 43-4 , 66 , 111 Frege, Gottlob 50 happiness 97-134 and H-desirables 114-18 , 120 and I-desirables 114-18 , 120 , 122 , 128 as a system of ends 131-4 as an end 97 , 113-15 , 119-20 , 123-8 Hardie, W. F. R. 119 hypothetical imperative 97 , see technical imperatives Isaacson, Dan 30n. incontinence 25 , 47 inferential principles 35 judging 51 , see acceptance Kant 4 , 21 , 25 , 31 , 43 , 44-5 , 70 , 77-8 , 86-7 , 90-8 logical theory 61 meaning ix-x and speech procedures 57-8 sentence meaning 68-9 what a speaker means 57-8 , 68 modes 68 , see moods moods xxii-xxiii , 50-6 , 59 , 69 , 71-2 embedding of mode-markers 87-9 judicative operator 50 , 72-3 , 90 volative operator 50 , 73 , 90 mood operators , see moods morality 63 , 98 Myro, George 40 Nagel, Thomas 64n. necessity xii-xiii , xvii-xxiii , 45 , 58-9 and provability 59 , 60-2 and relativized and absolute modalities 56-66 principle of total evidence 47 , 80-7 principles of inference 5 , 7 , 9 , 22-3 , 26 , 35 see also reasons, and necessity  provability 59 , 60-2 radical 50-3 , 58-9 , 72 , 88 rationality : as faculty manifested in reasoning 5 flat and variable 28-36 proto-rationality 33 rational being 4 , 25 , 28-30 and value as value-paradigmatic concept 35 rationality operator xiv-xv , 50-1 reasonable 23-5 reasoning 4-28 and defeasibility 47 , 79 , 92 defined 13-14 , 87-8 and explanation xxix-xxxv , 8 first account of 5-6 , 13-14 , 26-8 good reasoning 6 , 14-16 , 26-7 special status of 35 the hard way of 17 end p.135 incomplete reasoning 8-14 indeterminacy of 12-13 and intention 7 , 16 , 18-25 , 35-6 , 48-9 misreasoning 6-8 , 26 practical 46-50 probabilistic 46-50 as purposive activity 16-19 , 27-8 , 35 the quick way of 17 too good to be reasoning 14-18 reasons 37-66 altheic 44-5 , 49 division into practical and alethic 44 , 68 explanatory 37-9 justificatory 39-40 , 67-8 justificatory-explanatory 40-1 , 67 and modals 45 and necessity 44-5 personal 67 practical and non-practical (alethic) reasons compared xiixiii , 44-50 , 65 , 68 , 73-80 systematizing hypothesis 41-4 types of 37-44 Russell, Bertrand 50 satisfactoriness 60 , 87-9 , 95 technical imperatives 70 , 78 , 90 , 93-6 , 97 value 20 , 35 , 83 , 87-8 value paradigmatic concepts 35-6 von Wright 44 willing 50 , see acceptance Wittengenstein, Ludwig 50 -- English philosopher and proponent of empiricism, famous especially for his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689) and for his Second Treatise of Government, also published in 1689, though anonymously. He came from a middle-class Puritan family in Somerset, and became acquainted with Scholastic philosophy in his studies at Oxford. Not finding a career in church or university attractive, he trained for a while as a physician, and developed contacts with many members of the newly formed Royal Society; the chemist Robert Boyle and the physicist Isaac Newton were close acquaintances. In 1667 he joined the London households of the then Lord Ashley, later first Earl of Shaftesbury; there he became intimately involved in discussions surrounding the politics of resistance to the Catholic king, Charles II. In 1683 he fled England for the Netherlands, where he wrote out the final draft of his Essay. He returned to England in 1689, a year after the accession to the English throne of the Protestant William of Orange. In his last years he was the most famous intellectual in England, perhaps in Europe generally. Locke was not a university professor immersed in the discussions of the philosophy of “the schools” but was instead intensely engaged in the social and cultural issues of his day; his writings were addressed not to professional philosophers but to the educated public in general. The Essay. The initial impulse for the line of thought that culminated in the Essay occurred early in 1671, in a discussion Locke had with some friends in Lord Shaftesbury’s apartments in London on matters of morality and revealed religion. In his Epistle to the Reader at the beginning of the Essay Locke says that the discussants found themselves quickly at a stand by the difficulties that arose on every side. After we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course, and that before we set ourselves upon enquiries of that nature it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with. Locke was well aware that for a thousand years European humanity had consulted its textual inheritance for the resolution of its moral and religious quandaries; elaborate strategies of interpretation, distinction, etc., had been developed for extracting from those disparate sources a unified, highly complex, body of truth. He was equally well aware that by his time, more than a hundred years after the beginning of the Reformation, the moral and religious tradition of Europe had broken up into warring and contradictory fragments. Accordingly he warns his readers over and over against basing their convictions merely on say-so, on unexamined tradition. As he puts it in a short late book of his, The Conduct of the Understanding, “We should not judge of things by men’s opinions, but of opinions by things.” We should look to “the things themselves,” as he sometimes puts it. But to know how to get at the things themselves it is necessary, so Locke thought, “to examine our own abilities.” Hence the project of the Essay. The Essay comes in four books, Book IV being the culmination. Fundamental to understanding Locke’s thought in Book IV is the realization that knowledge, as he thinks of it, is a fundamentally different phenomenon from belief. Locke holds, indeed, that knowledge is typically accompanied by belief; it is not, though, to be identified with it. Knowledge, as he thinks of it, is direct awareness of some fact – in his own words, perception of some agreement or disagreement among things. Belief, by contrast, consists of taking some proposition to be true – whether or not one is directly aware of the corresponding fact. The question then arises: Of what sorts of facts do we human beings have direct awareness? Locke’s answer is: Only of facts that consist of relationships among our “ideas.” Exactly what Locke had in mind when he spoke of ideas is a vexed topic; the traditional view, for which there is a great deal to be said, is that he regarded ideas as mental objects. Furthermore, he clearly regarded some ideas as being representations of other entities; his own view was that we can think about nonmental entities only by being aware of mental entities that represent those non-mental realities. Locke argued that knowledge, thus understood, is “short and scanty” – much too short and scanty for the living of life. Life requires the formation of beliefs on matters where knowledge is not available. Now what strikes anyone who surveys human beliefs is that many of them are false. What also strikes any perceptive observer of the scene is that often we can – or could have – done something about this. We can, to use Locke’s language, “regulate” and “govern” our belief-forming capacities with the goal in mind of getting things right. Locke was persuaded that not only can we thus regulate and govern our belief-forming capacities; we ought to do so. It is a God-given obligation that rests upon all of us. Specifically, for each human being there are some matters of such “concernment,” as Locke calls it, as to place the person under obligation to try his or her best to get things right. For all of us there will be many issues that are not of such concernment; for those cases, it will be acceptable to form our beliefs in whatever way nature or custom has taught us to form them. But for each of us there will be certain practical matters concerning which we are obligated to try our best – these differing from person to person. And certain matters of ethics and religion are of such concern to everybody that we are all obligated to try our best, on these matters, to get in touch with reality. What does trying our best consist of, when knowledge – perception, awareness, insight – is not available? One can think of the practice Locke recommends as having three steps. First one collects whatever evidence one can find for and against the proposition in question. This evidence must consist of things that one knows; otherwise we are just wandering in darkness. And the totality of the evidence must be a reliable indicator of the probability of the proposition that one is considering. Second, one analyzes the evidence to determine the probability of the proposition in question, on that evidence. And last, one places a level of confidence in the proposition that is proportioned to its probability on that satisfactory evidence. If the proposition is highly probable on that evidence, one believes it very firmly; if it only is quite probable, one believes it rather weakly; etc. The main thrust of the latter half of Book IV of the Essay is Locke’s exhortation to his readers to adopt this practice in the forming of beliefs on matters of high concernment – and in particular, on matters of morality and religion. It was his view that the new science being developed by his friends Boyle and Newton and others was using exactly this method. Though Book IV was clearly seen by Locke as the culmination of the Essay, it by no means constitutes the bulk of it. Book I launches a famous attack on innate ideas and innate knowledge; he argues that all our ideas and knowledge can be accounted for by tracing the way in which the mind uses its innate capacities to work on material presented to it by sensation and reflection (i.e., self-awareness). Book II then undertakes to account for all our ideas, on the assumption that the only “input” is ideas of sensation and reflection, and that the mind, which at birth is a tabula rasa (or blank tablet), works on these by such operations as combination, division, generalization, and abstraction. And then in Book III Locke discusses the various ways in which words hinder us in our attempt to get to the things themselves. Along with many other thinkers of the time, Locke distinguished between what he called natural theology and what he called revealed theology. It was his view that a compelling, demonstrative argument could be given for the existence of God, and thus that we could have knowledge of God’s existence; the existence of God is a condition of our own existence. In addition, he believed firmly that God had revealed things to human beings. As he saw the situation, however, we can at most have beliefs, not knowledge, concerning what God has revealed. For we can never just “see” that a certain episode in human affairs is a case of divine revelation. Accordingly, we must apply the practice outlined above, beginning by assembling satisfactory evidence for the conclusion that a certain episode really is a case of divine revelation. In Locke’s view, the occurrence of miracles provides the required evidence. An implication of these theses concerning natural and revealed religion is that it is never right for a human being to believe something about God without having evidence for its truth, with the evidence consisting ultimately of things that one “sees” immediately to be true. Locke held to a divine command theory of moral obligation; to be morally obligated to do something is for God to require of one that one do that. And since a great deal of what Jesus taught, as Locke saw it, was a code of moral obligation, it follows that once we have evidence for the revelatory status of what Jesus said, we automatically have evidence that what Jesus taught as our moral obligation really is that. Locke was firmly persuaded, however, that revelation is not our only mode of access to moral obligation. Most if not all of our moral obligations can also be arrived at by the use of our natural capacities, unaided by revelation. To that part of our moral obligations which can in principle be arrived at by the use of our natural capacities, Locke (in traditional fashion) gave the title of natural law. Locke’s own view was that morality could in principle be established as a deductive science, on analogy to mathematics: one would first argue for God’s existence and for our status as creatures of God; one would then argue that God was good, and cared for the happiness of God’s creatures. Then one would argue that such a good God would lay down commands to his creatures, aimed at their overall happiness. From there, one would proceed to reflect on what does in fact conduce to human happiness. And so forth. Locke never worked out the details of such a deductive system of ethics; late in his life he concluded that it was beyond his capacities. But he never gave up on the ideal. The Second Treatise and other writings. Locke’s theory of natural law entered intimately into the theory of civil obedience that he developed in the Second Treatise of Government. Imagine, he said, a group of human beings living in what he called a state of nature – i.e., a condition in which there is no governmental authority and no private property. They would still be under divine obligation; and much (if not all) of that obligation would be accessible to them by the use of their natural capacities. There would be for them a natural law. In this state of nature they would have title to their own persons and labor; natural law tells us that these are inherently our “possessions.” But there would be no possessions beyond that. The physical world would be like a gigantic English commons, given by God to humanity as a whole. Locke then addresses himself to two questions: How can we account for the emergence of political obligation from such a situation, and how can we account for the emergence of private property? As to the former, his answer is that we in effect make a contract with one another to institute a government for the Locke, John Locke, John 508 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 508 elimination of certain deficiencies in the state of nature, and then to obey that government, provided it does what we have contracted with one another it should do and does not exceed that. Among the deficiencies of the state of nature that a government can be expected to correct is the sinful tendency of human beings to transgress on other persons’ properties, and the equally sinful tendency to punish such transgressions more severely than the law of nature allows. As to the emergence of private property, something from the world at large becomes a given person’s property when that person “mixes” his or her labor with it. For though God gave the world as a whole to all of us together, natural law tells us that each person’s labor belongs to that person himself or herself – unless he or she freely contracts it to someone else. Locke’s Second Treatise is thus an articulate statement of the so-called liberal theory of the state; it remains one of the greatest of such, and proved enormously influential. It should be seen as supplemented by the Letters concerning Toleration (1689, 1690, 1692) that Locke wrote on religious toleration, in which he argued that all theists who have not pledged civil allegiance to some foreign power should be granted equal toleration. Some letters that Locke wrote to a friend concerning the education of the friend’s son should also be seen as supplementing the grand vision. If we survey the way in which beliefs are actually formed in human beings, we see that passion, the partisanship of distinct traditions, early training, etc., play important obstructive roles. It is impossible to weed out entirely from one’s life the influence of such factors. When it comes to matters of high “concernment,” however, it is our obligation to do so; it is our obligation to implement the three-step practice outlined above, which Locke defends as doing one’s best. But Locke did not think that the cultural reform he had in mind, represented by the appropriate use of this new practice, could be expected to come about as the result just of writing books and delivering exhortations. Training in the new practice was required; in particular, training of small children, before bad habits had been ingrained. Accordingly, Locke proposes in Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) an educational program aimed at training children in when and how to collect satisfactory evidence, appraise the probabilities of propositions on such evidence, and place levels of confidence in those propositions proportioned to their probability on that evidence. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “To Locke,” C. McGinn, “Grice and Locke as telementationalists.”

implicaturum: logical consequence, a proposition, sentence, or other piece of information that follows logically from one or more other propositions, sentences, or pieces of information. A proposition C is said to follow logically from, or to be a logical consequence of, propositions P1, P2, . . . , if it must be the case that, on the assumption that P1, P2, . . . , Pn are all true, the proposition C is true as well. For example, the proposition ‘Smith is corrupt’ is a logical consequence of the two propositions ‘All politicians are corrupt’ and ‘Smith is a politician’, since it must be the case that on the assumption that ‘All politicians are corrupt’ and ‘Smith is a politician’ are both true, ‘Smith is corrupt’ is also true. Notice that proposition C can be a logical consequence of propositions P1, P2, . . . , Pn, even if P1, P2, . . . , Pn are not actually all true. Indeed this is the case in our example. ‘All politicians are corrupt’ is not, in fact, true: there are some honest politicians. But if it were true, and if Smith were a politician, then ‘Smith is corrupt’ would have to be true. Because of this, it is said to be a logical consequence of those two propositions. The logical consequence relation is often written using the symbol X, called the double turnstile. Thus to indicate that C is a logical consequence of P1, P2, . . . , Pn, we would write: P1, P2, . . . , Pn X C or: P X C where P stands for the set containing the propositions p1, P2, . . . , Pn. The term ‘logical consequence’ is sometimes reserved for cases in which C follows from P1, P2, . . . , Pn solely in virtue of the meanings of the socalled logical expressions (e.g., ‘some’, ‘all’, ‘or’, ‘and’, ‘not’) contained by these propositions. In this more restricted sense, ‘Smith is not a politician’ is not a logical consequence of the proposition ‘All politicians are corrupt’ and ‘Smith is honest’, since to recognize the consequence relation here we must also understand the specific meanings of the non-logical expressions ‘corrupt’ and ‘honest’.

constant – in system G -- a symbol, such as the connectives -, 8, /, or S or the quantifiers D or E of elementary quantification theory, that represents logical form. The contrast here is with expressions such as terms, predicates, and function symbols, which are supposed to represent the “content” of a sentence or proposition. Beyond this, there is little consensus on how to understand logical constancy. It is sometimes said, e.g., that a symbol is a logical constant if its interpretation is fixed across admissible valuations, though there is disagreement over exactly how to construe this “fixity” constraint. This account seems to make logical form a mere artifact of one’s choice of a model theory. More generally, it has been questioned whether there are any objective grounds for classifying some expressions as logical and others not, or whether such a distinction is (wholly or in part) conventional. Other philosophers have suggested that logical constancy is less a semantic notion than an epistemic one: roughly, that a is a logical constant if the semantic behavior of certain other expressions together with the semantic contribution of a determine a priori (or in some other epistemically privileged fashion) the extensions of complex expressions in which a occurs. There is also considerable debate over whether particular symbols, such as the identity sign, modal operators, and quantifiers other than D and E, are, or should be treated as, logical constants.

Grice’s “logical construction” – a phrase he borrowed from Broad via Russell -- something built by logical operations from certain elements. Suppose that any sentence, S, containing terms apparently referring to objects of type F can be paraphrased without any essential loss of content into some (possibly much more complicated) sentence, Sp, containing only terms referring to objects of type G (distinct from F): in this case, objects of type F may be said to be logical constructions out of objects of type G. The notion originates with Russell’s concept of an “incomplete symbol,” which he introduced in connection with his theory of descriptions. According to Russell, a definite description – i.e., a descriptive phrase, such as ‘the present king of France’, apparently picking out a unique object – cannot be taken at face value as a genuinely referential term. One reason for this is that the existence of the objects seemingly referred to by such phrases can be meaningfully denied. We can say, “The present king of France does not exist,” and it is hard to see how this could be if ‘the present king of France’, to be meaningful, has to refer to the present king of France. One solution, advocated by Meinong, is to claim that the referents required by what ordinary grammar suggests are singular terms must have some kind of “being,” even though this need not amount to actual existence; but this solution offended Russell’s “robust sense of reality.” According to Peano, Whitehead and Russell, then, ‘The F is G’ is to be understood as equivalent to (something like) ‘One and only one thing Fs and that thing is G’. (The phrase ‘one and only one’ can itself be paraphrased away in terms of quantifiers and identity.) The crucial feature of this analysis is that it does not define the problematic phrases by providing synonyms: rather, it provides a rule, which Russell called “a definition in use,” for paraphrasing whole sentences in which they occur into whole sentences in which they do not. This is why definite descriptions are “incomplete symbols”: we do not specify objects that are their meanings; we lay down a rule that explains the meaning of whole sentences in which they occur. Thus definite descriptions disappear under analysis, and with them the shadowy occupants of Meinong’s realm of being. Russell thought that the kind of analysis represented by the theory of descriptions gives the clue to the proper method for philosophy: solve metaphysical and epistemological problems by reducing ontological commitments. The task of philosophy is to substitute, wherever possible, logical constructions for inferred entities. Thus in the philosophy of mathematics, Russell attempted to eliminate numbers, as a distinct category of objects, by showing how mathematical statements can be translated into (what he took to be) purely logical statements. But what really gave Russell’s program its bite was his thought that we can refer only to objects with which we are directly acquainted. This committed him to holding that all terms apparently referring to objects that cannot be regarded as objects of acquaintance should be given contextual definitions along the lines of the theory of descriptions: i.e., to treating everything beyond the scope of acquaintance as a logical construction (or a “logical fiction”). Most notably, Russell regarded physical objects as logical constructions out of sense-data, taking this to resolve the skeptical problem about our knowledge of the external world. The project of showing how physical objects can be treated as logical constructions out of sense-data was a major concern of analytical philosophers in the interwar period, Carnap’s Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, standing as perhaps its major monument. However, the project was not a success. Even Carnap’s construction involves a system of space-time coordinates that is not analyzed in sense-datum terms and today few, if any, philosophers believe that such ambitious projects can be carried through..

informatum -- forma: “To inform was originally to mould, to shape,” and so quite different from Grecian ‘eidos.’ But the ‘forma-materia’ distinction stuck. Whhat is obtained from a proposition, a set of propositions, or an argument by abstracting from the matter of its content terms or by regarding the content terms as mere place-holders or blanks in a form. In what Grice (after Bergmann) calls an ideal (versus an ordinary) language the form of a proposition, a set of propositions, or an argument is determined by the ‘matter’ of the sentence, the set of sentences, or the argument-text expressing it. Two sentences, sets of sentences, or argument-texts are said to have the same form, in this way, if a uniform one-toone substitution of content words transforms the one exactly into the other. ‘Abe properly respects every agent who respects himself’ may be regarded as having the same form as the sentence ‘Ben generously assists every patient who assists himself’. Substitutions used to determine sameness of form (isomorphism) cannot involve change of form words such as ‘every’, ‘no’, ‘some’, ‘is’, etc., and they must be category-preserving, i.e., they must put a proper name for a proper name, an adverb for an adverb, a transitive verb for a transitive verb, and so on. Two sentences having the same grammatical form have exactly the same form words distributed in exactly the same pattern; and although they of course need not, and usually do not, have the same content words, they do have logical dependence logical form exactly the same number of content words. The most distinctive feature of form words, which are also called syncategorematic terms or logical terms, is their topic neutrality; the form words in a sentence are entirely independent of and are in no way indicative of its content or topic. Modern formal languages used in formal axiomatizations of mathematical sciences are often taken as examples of logically perfect languages. Pioneering work on logically perfect languages was done by George Boole, Frege, Giuseppe Peano, Russell, and Church. According to the principle of form, an argument is valid or invalid in virtue of form. More explicitly, every two arguments in the same form are both valid or both invalid. Thus, every argument in the same form as a valid argument is valid and every argument in the same form as an invalid argument is invalid. The argument form that a given argument fits (or has) is not determined solely by the logical forms of its constituent propositions; the arrangement of those propositions is critical because the process of interchanging a premise with the conclusion of a valid argument can result in an invalid argument. The principle of logical form, from which formal logic gets its name, is commonly used in establishing invalidity of arguments and consistency of sets of propositions. In order to show that a given argument is invalid it is sufficient to exhibit another argument as being in the same logical form and as having all true premises and a false conclusion. In order to show that a given set of propositions is consistent it is sufficient to exhibit another set of propositions as being in the same logical form and as being composed exclusively of true propositions. The history of these methods traces back through non-Cantorian set theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and medieval logicians (especially Anselm) to Aristotle. These methods must be used with extreme caution in an ordinary languages that fails to be logically perfect as a result of ellipsis, amphiboly, ambiguity, etc. E.g. ‘This is a male dog’ implies ‘This is a dog.’ But ‘This is a brass monkey’ does not strictly imply – but implicate -- ‘This is a monkey’, as would be required in a what Bergmann calls an ideal (or perfect, rather than ordinary or imperfect) language. Likewise, of two propositions commonly expressed by the ambiguous sentence ‘Ann and Ben are married’ one does and one does not imply (but at most ‘implicate’) the proposition that Ann is married to Ben. (cf. We are married, but not to each other – a New-World ditty.). Grice, Quine and other philosophers – not Strawson! -- are careful to distinguish, in effect, the unique form of a proposition from this or that ‘schematic’ form it may display. The proposition (A) ‘If Abe is Ben, if Ben is wise Abe is wise’ has exactly one form, which it shares with ‘If Carl is Dan, if Dan is kind Carl is kind’, whereas it has all of the following schematic forms: ‘If P, if Q then R;’ ‘If P, Q;’ and ‘P.’ The principle of form for propositions is that every two propositions in the same form are both tautological (logically necessary) or both non-tautological. Thus, although the propositions above are tautological, there are non-tautological propositions that fit this or that the schematic form just mentioned. Failure to distinguish form proper from ‘schematic form’ has led to fallacies. According to the principle of logical form quoted above every argument in the same logical form as an invalid argument is invalid, but it is not the case that every argument sharing a schematic form with an invalid argument is invalid. Contrary to what would be fallaciously thought, the conclusion ‘Abe is Ben’ is logically implied by the following two propositions taken together, ‘If Abe is Ben, Ben is Abe’ and ‘Ben is Abe’, even though the argument shares a schematic form with invalid arguments “committing” the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Refs.: Grice, “Leibniz on ‘lingua perfecta.’”

indicatum --  indicator: an expression that provides some help in identifying the conclusion of an argument or the premises offered in support of a conclusion. Common premise indicators include ‘for’, ‘because’, and ‘since’. Common conclusion indicators include ‘so’, ‘it follows that’, ‘hence’, ‘thus’, and ‘therefore’. Since Tom sat in the back of the room, he could not hear the performance clearly. Therefore, he could not write a proper review. ’Since’ makes clear that Tom’s seat location is offered as a reason to explain his inability to hear the performance. ‘Therefore’ indicates that the proposition that Tom could not write a proper review is the conclusion of the argument.

notatum: symbol or communication device designed to achieve unambiguous formulation of principles and inferences in deductive logic. A notation involves some regimentation of words, word order, etc., of language. Some schematization was attempted even in ancient times by Aristotle, the Megarians, the Stoics, Boethius, and the medievals. But Leibniz’s vision of a universal logical language began to be realized only in the past 150 years. The notation is not yet standardized, but the following varieties of logical operators in propositional and predicate calculus may be noted. Given that ‘p’, ‘q’, ‘r’, etc., are propositional variables, or propositions, we find, in the contexts of their application, the following variety of operators (called truth-functional connectives). Negation: ‘-p’, ‘Ýp’, ‘p - ’, ‘p’ ’. Conjunction: ‘p • q’, ‘p & q’, ‘p 8 q’. Weak or inclusive disjunction: ‘p 7 q’. Strong or exclusive disjunction: ‘p V q’, ‘p ! q’, ‘p W q’. Material conditional (sometimes called material implication): ‘p / q’, ‘p P q’. Material biconditional (sometimes called material equivalence): ‘p S q’, ‘p Q q’. And, given that ‘x’, ‘y’, ‘z’, etc., are individual variables and ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, etc., are predicate letters, we find in the predicate calculus two quantifiers, a universal and an existential quantifier: Universal quantification: ‘(x)Fx’, ‘(Ex)Fx’, ‘8xFx’. Existential quantification: ‘(Ex)Fx’, ‘(Dx)Fx’, ‘7xFx’. The formation principle in all the schemata involving dyadic or binary operators (connectives) is that the logical operator is placed between the propositional variables (or propositional constants) connected by it. But there exists a notation, the so-called Polish notation, based on the formation rule stipulating that all operators, and not only negation and quantifiers, be placed in front of the schemata over which they are ranging. The following representations are the result of application of that rule: Negation: ‘Np’. Conjunction: ‘Kpq’. Weak or inclusive disjunction: ‘Apq’. Strong or exclusive disjunction: ‘Jpq’. Conditional: ‘Cpq’. Biconditional: ‘Epq’. Sheffer stroke: ‘Dpq’. Universal quantification: ‘PxFx’. Existential quantifications: ‘9xFx’. Remembering that ‘K’, ‘A’, ‘J’, ‘C’, ‘E’, and ‘D’ are dyadic functors, we expect them to be followed by two propositional signs, each of which may itself be simple or compound, but no parentheses are needed to prevent ambiguity. Moreover, this notation makes it very perspicuous as to what kind of proposition a given compound proposition is: all we need to do is to look at the leftmost operator. To illustrate, ‘p7 (q & r) is a disjunction of ‘p’ with the conjunction ‘Kqr’, i.e., ‘ApKqr’, while ‘(p 7 q) & r’ is a conjunction of a disjunction ‘Apq’ with ‘r’, i.e., ‘KApqr’. ‘- p P q’ is written as ‘CNpq’, i.e., ‘if Np, then q’, while negation of the whole conditional, ‘-(p P q)’, becomes ‘NCpq’. A logical thesis such as ‘((p & q) P r) P ((s P p) P (s & q) P r))’ is written concisely as ‘CCKpqrCCspCKsqr’. The general proposition ‘(Ex) (Fx P Gx)’ is written as ‘PxCFxGx’, while a truth-function of quantified propositions ‘(Ex)Fx P (Dy)Gy’ is written as ‘CPxFx9yGy’. An equivalence such as ‘(Ex) Fx Q - (Dx) - Fx’ becomes ‘EPxFxN9xNFx’, etc. Dot notation is way of using dots to construct well-formed formulas that is more thrifty with punctuation marks than the use of parentheses with their progressive strengths of scope. But dot notation is less thrifty than the parenthesis-free Polish notation, which secures well-formed expressions entirely on the basis of the order of logical operators relative to truth-functional compounds. Various dot notations have been devised. The convention most commonly adopted is that punctuation dots always operate away from the connective symbol that they flank. It is best to explain dot punctuation by examples: (1) ‘p 7 (q - r)’ becomes ‘p 7 .q P - r’; (2) ‘(p 7 q) P - r’ becomes ‘p 7 q. P - r’; (3) ‘(p P (q Q r)) 7 (p 7 r)’ becomes ‘p P. q Q r: 7. p 7r’; (4) ‘(- pQq)•(rPs)’ becomes ‘-p Q q . r Q s’. logically perfect language logical notation 513 4065h-l.qxd 08/02/1999 7:40 AM Page 513 Note that here the dot is used as conjunction dot and is not flanked by punctuation dots, although in some contexts additional punctuation dots may have to be added, e.g., ‘p.((q . r) P s), which is rewritten as ‘p : q.r. P s’. The scope of a group of n dots extends to the group of n or more dots. (5) ‘- p Q (q.(r P s))’ becomes ‘- p. Q : q.r P s’; (6)‘- pQ((q . r) Ps)’ becomes ‘~p. Q: q.r.Ps’; (7) ‘(- p Q (q . r)) P s’ becomes ‘- p Q. q.r: P s’. The notation for modal propositions made popular by C. I. Lewis consisted of the use of ‘B’ to express the idea of possibility, in terms of which other alethic modal notions were defined. Thus, starting with ‘B p’ for ‘It is possiblethat p’ we get ‘- B p’ for ‘It is not possible that p’ (i.e., ‘It is impossible that p’), ‘- B - p’ for ‘It is not possible that not p’ (i.e., ‘It is necessary that p’), and ‘B - p’ for ‘It is possible that not p’ (i.e., ‘It is contingent that p’ in the sense of ‘It is not necessary that p’, i.e., ‘It is possible that not p’). Given this primitive or undefined notion of possibility, Lewis proceeded to introduce the notion of strict implication, represented by ‘ ’ and defined as follows: ‘p q .% . - B (p. -q)’. More recent tradition finds it convenient to use ‘A’, either as a defined or as a primitive symbol of necessity. In the parenthesis-free Polish notation the letter ‘M’ is usually added as the sign of possibility and sometimes the letter ‘L’ is used as the sign of necessity. No inconvenience results from adopting these letters, as long as they do not coincide with any of the existing truthfunctional operators ‘N’, ‘K’, ‘A’, ‘J’, ‘C’, ‘E’, ‘D’. Thus we can express symbolically the sentences ‘If p is necessary, then p is possible’ as ‘CNMNpMp’ or as ‘CLpMp’; ‘It is necessary that whatever is F is G’ as ‘NMNPxCFxGx’ or as ‘LPxCFxGx’; and ‘Whatever is F is necessarily G’ as ‘PxCFxNMNGx’ or as PxCFxLGx; etc.

logical positivism, also called positivism, a philosophical movement inspired by empiricism and verificationism. While there are still philosophers who would identify themselves with some of the logical positivists’ theses, many of the central docrines of the theory have come under considerable attack in the last half of this century. In some ways logical positivism can be seen as a natural outgrowth of radical or British empiricism and logical atomism. The driving force of positivism may well have been adherence to the verifiability criterion for the meaningfulness of cognitive statements. Acceptance of this principle led positivists to reject as problematic many assertions of religion, morality, and the kind of philosophy they described as metaphysics. The verifiability criterion of meaning. The radical empiricists took genuine ideas to be composed of simple ideas traceable to elements in experience. If this is true and if thoughts about the empirical world are “made up” out of ideas, it would seem to follow that all genuine thoughts about the world must have as constituents thoughts that denote items of experience. While not all positivists tied meaning so clearly to the sort of experiences the empiricists had in mind, they were convinced that a genuine contingent assertion about the world must be verifiable through experience or observation. Questions immediately arose concerning the relevant sense of ‘verify’. Extreme versions of the theory interpret verification in terms of experiences or observations that entail the truth of the proposition in question. Thus for my assertion that there is a table before me to be meaningful, it must be in principle possible for me to accumulate evidence or justification that would guarantee the existence of the table, which would make it impossible for the table not to exist. Even this statement of the view is ambiguous, however, for the impossibility of error could be interpreted as logical or conceptual, or something much weaker, say, causal. Either way, extreme verificationism seems vulnerable to objections. Universal statements, such as ‘All metal expands when heated’, are meaningful, but it is doubtful that any observations could ever conclusively verify them. One might modify the criterion to include as meaningful only statements that can be either conclusively confirmed or conclusively disconfirmed. It is doubtful, however, that even ordinary statements about the physical world satisfy the extreme positivist insistence that they admit of conclusive verification or falsification. If the evidence we have for believing what we do about the physical world consists of knowledge of fleeting and subjective sensation, the possibility of hallucination or deception by a malevolent, powerful being seems to preclude the possibility of any finite sequence of sensations conclusively establishing the existence or absence of a physical object. Faced with these difficulties, at least some positivists retreated to a more modest form of verificationism which insisted only that if a proposition is to be meaningful it must be possible to find evidence or justification that bears on the likelihood of the proposition’s being true. It is, of course, much more difficult to find counterexamples to this weaker form of verificationism, but by the same token it is more difficult to see how the principle will do the work the positivists hoped it would do of weeding out allegedly problematic assertions. Necessary truth. Another central tenet of logical positivism is that all meaningful statements fall into two categories: necessary truths that are analytic and knowable a priori, and contingent truths that are synthetic and knowable only a posteriori. If a meaningful statement is not a contingent, empirical statement verifiable through experience, then it is either a formal tautology or is analytic, i.e., reducible to a formal tautology through substitution of synonymous expressions. According to the positivist, tautologies and analytic truths that do not describe the world are made true (if true) or false (if false) by some fact about the rules of language. ‘P or not-P’ is made true by rules we have for the use of the connectives ‘or’ and ‘not’ and for the assignments of the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’. Again there are notorious problems for logical positivism. It is difficult to reduce the following apparently necessary truths to formal tautologies through the substitution of synonymous expressions: (1) Everything that is blue (all over) is not red (all over). (2) All equilateral triangles are equiangular triangles. (3) No proposition is both true and false. Ironically, the positivists had a great deal of trouble categorizing the very theses that defined their view, such as the claims about meaningfulness and verifiability and the claims about the analytic–synthetic distinction. Reductionism. Most of the logical positivists were committed to a foundationalist epistemology according to which all justified belief rests ultimately on beliefs that are non-inferentially justified. These non-inferentially justified beliefs were sometimes described as basic, and the truths known in such manner were often referred to as self-evident, or as protocol statements. Partly because the positivists disagreed as to how to understand the notion of a basic belief or a protocol statement, and even disagreed as to what would be good examples, positivism was by no means a monolithic movement. Still, the verifiability criterion of meaning, together with certain beliefs about where the foundations of justification lie and beliefs about what constitutes legitimate reasoning, drove many positivists to embrace extreme forms of reductionism. Briefly, most of them implicitly recognized only deduction and (reluctantly) induction as legitimate modes of reasoning. Given such a view, difficult epistemological gaps arise between available evidence and the commonsense conclusions we want to reach about the world around us. The problem was particularly acute for empiricists who recognized as genuine empirical foundations only propositions describing perceptions or subjective sensations. Such philosophers faced an enormous difficulty explaining how what we know about sensations could confirm for us assertions about an objective physical world. Clearly we cannot deduce any truths about the physical world from what we know about sensations (remember the possibility of hallucination). Nor does it seem that we could inductively establish sensation as evidence for the existence of the physical world when all we have to rely on ultimately is our awareness of sensations. Faced with the possibility that all of our commonplace assertions about the physical world might fail the verifiability test for meaningfulness, many of the positivists took the bold step of arguing that statements about the physical world could really be viewed as reducible to (equivalent in meaning to) very complicated statements about sensations. Phenomenalists, as these philosophers were called, thought that asserting that a given table exists is equivalent in meaning to a complex assertion about what sensations or sequences of sensations a subject would have were he to have certain other sensations. The gap between sensation and the physical world is just one of the epistemic gaps threatening the meaningfulness of commonplace assertions about the world. If all we know about the mental states of others is inferred from their physical behavior, we must still explain how such inference is justified. Thus logical positivists who took protocol statements to include ordinary assertions about the physical world were comfortable reducing talk about the mental states of others to talk about their behavior; this is logical behaviorism. Even some of those positivists who thought empirical propositions had to be reduced ultimately to talk about sensations were prepared to translate talk about the mental states of others into talk about their behavior, which, ironically, would in turn get translated right back into talk about sensation. Many of the positivists were primarily concerned with the hypotheses of theoretical physics, which seemed to go far beyond anything that could be observed. In the context of philosophy of science, some positivists seemed to take as unproblematic ordinary statements about the macrophysical world but were still determined either to reduce theoretical statements in science to complex statements about the observable world, or to view theoretical entities as a kind of convenient fiction, description of which lacks any literal truth-value. The limits of a positivist’s willingness to embrace reductionism are tested, however, when he comes to grips with knowledge of the past. It seems that propositions describing memory experiences (if such “experiences” really exist) do not entail any truths about the past, nor does it seem possible to establish memory inductively as a reliable indicator of the past. (How could one establish the past correlations without relying on memory?) The truly hard-core reductionists actually toyed with the possibility of reducing talk about the past to talk about the present and future, but it is perhaps an understatement to suggest that at this point the plausibility of the reductionist program was severely strained.

logical product, a conjunction of propositions or predicates. The term ‘product’ derives from an analogy that conjunction bears to arithmetic multiplication, and that appears very explicitly in an algebraic logic such as a Boolean algebra. In the same way, ‘logical sum’ usually means the disjunction of propositions or predicates, and the term ‘sum’ derives from an analogy that disjunction bears with arithmetic addition. In the logical literature of the nineteenth century, e.g. in the works of Peirce, ‘logical product’ and ‘logical sum’ often refer to the relative product and relative sum, respectively. In the work of George Boole, ‘logical sum’ indicates an operation that corresponds not to disjunction but rather to the exclusive ‘or’. The use of ‘logical sum’ in its contemporary sense was introduced by John Venn and then adopted and promulgated by Peirce. ‘Relative product’ was introduced by Augustus De Morgan and also adopted and promulgated by Peirce.

subjectum – The subjectum-praedicatum distinction -- in Aristotelian and traditional (and what Grice calls NEO-traditionalism of Strawson) logic, the common noun, or sometimes the intension or the extension of the common noun, that follows the initial quantifier word (‘every’, ‘some’, ‘no’, etc.) of a sentence, as opposed to the material subject, which is the entire noun phrase including the quantifier and the noun, and in some usages, any modifiers that may apply. The material subject of ‘Every number exceeding zero is positive’ is ‘every number’, or in some usages, ‘every number exceeding zero’, whereas the conceptual or formal subject is ‘number’, or the intension or the extension of ‘number’. Similar distinctions are made between the logical predicate and the grammatical predicate: in the above example, ‘is positive’ is the material predicate, whereas the formal predicate is the adjective ‘positive’, or sometimes the property of being positive or even the extension of ‘positive’. In standard first-order predicate calculus with identity, the formal subject of a sentence under a given interpretation is the entire universe of discourse of the interpretation.

Grice on syntactics, semantics, and pramatics – syntactics -- description of the forms of the expressions of a language in virtue of which the expressions stand in logical relations to one another. Implicit in the idea of logical syntax is the assumption that all – or at least most – logical relations hold in virtue of form: e.g., that ‘If snow is white, then snow has color’ and ‘Snow is white’ jointly entail ‘Snow has color’ in virtue of their respective forms, ‘If P, then Q’, ‘P’, and ‘Q’. The form assigned to an expression in logical syntax is its logical form. Logical form may not be immediately apparent from the surface form of an expression. Both (1) ‘Every individual is physical’ and (2) ‘Some individual is physical’ apparently share the subjectpredicate form. But this surface form is not the form in virtue of which these sentences (or the propositions they might be said to express) stand in logical relations to other sentences (or propositions), for if it were, (1) and (2) would have the same logical relations to all sentences (or propositions), but they do not; (1) and (3) ‘Aristotle is an individual’ jointly entail (4) ‘Aristotle is physical’, whereas (2) and (3) do not jointly entail (4). So (1) and (2) differ in logical form. The contemporary logical syntax, devised largely by Frege, assigns very different logical forms to (1) and (2), namely: ‘For every x, if x is an individual, then x is physical’ and ‘For some x, x is an individual and x is physical’, respectively. Another example: (5) ‘The satellite of the moon has water’ seems to entail ‘There is at least one thing that orbits the moon’ and ‘There is no more than one thing that orbits the moon’. In view of this, Russell assigned to (5) the logical form ‘For some x, x orbits the moon, and for every y, if y orbits the moon, then y is identical with x, and for every y, if y orbits the moon, then y has water’. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Peirce, Mead, and Morris on the semiotic triad – and why we don’t study them at Oxford.”

logicism, the thesis that mathematics, or at least some significant portion thereof, is part of logic. Modifying Carnap’s suggestion (in “The Logicist Foundation for Mathematics,” first published in Erkenntnis), this thesis is the conjunction of two theses: expressibility logicism: mathematical propositions are (or are alternative expressions of) purely logical propositions; and derivational logicism: the axioms and theorems of mathematics can be derived from pure logic. Here is a motivating example from the arithmetic of the natural numbers. Let the cardinality-quantifiers be those expressible in the form ‘there are exactly . . . many xs such that’, which we abbreviate ¢(. . . x),Ü with ‘. . .’ replaced by an Arabic numeral. These quantifiers are expressible with the resources of first-order logic with identity; e.g. ‘(2x)Px’ is equivalent to ‘DxDy(x&y & Ez[Pz S (z%x 7 z%y)])’, the latter involving no numerals or other specifically mathematical vocabulary. Now 2 ! 3 % 5 is surely a mathematical truth. We might take it to express the following: if we take two things and then another three things we have five things, which is a validity of second-order logic involving no mathematical vocabulary: EXEY ([(2x) Xx & (3x)Yx & ÝDx(Xx & Yx)] / (5x) (Xx 7 Yx)). Furthermore, this is provable in any formalized fragment of second-order logic that includes all of first-order logic with identity and secondorder ‘E’-introduction. But what counts as logic? As a derivation? As a derivation from pure logic? Such unclarities keep alive the issue of whether some version or modification of logicism is true. The “classical” presentations of logicism were Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik and Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. Frege took logic to be a formalized fragment of secondorder logic supplemented by an operator forming singular terms from “incomplete” expressions, such a term standing for an extension of the “incomplete” expression standing for a concept of level 1 (i.e. type 1). Axiom 5 of Grundgesetze served as a comprehension-axiom implying the existence of extensions for arbitrary Fregean concepts of level 1. In his famous letter of 1901 Russell showed that axiom to be inconsistent, thus derailing Frege’s original program. Russell and Whitehead took logic to be a formalized fragment of a ramified full finite-order (i.e. type w) logic, with higher-order variables ranging over appropriate propositional functions. The Principia and their other writings left the latter notion somewhat obscure. As a defense of expressibility logicism, Principia had this peculiarity: it postulated typical ambiguity where naive mathematics seemed unambiguous; e.g., each type had its own system of natural numbers two types up. As a defense of derivational logicism, Principia was flawed by virtue of its reliance on three axioms, a version of the Axiom of Choice, and the axioms of Reducibility and Infinity, whose truth was controversial. Reducibility could be avoided by eliminating the ramification of the logic (as suggested by Ramsey). But even then, even the arithmetic of the natural numbers required use of Infinity, which in effect asserted that there are infinitely many individuals (i.e., entities of type 0). Though Infinity was “purely logical,” i.e., contained only logical expressions, in his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (p. 141) Russell admits that it “cannot be asserted by logic to be true.” Russell then (pp. 194–95) forgets this: “If there are still those who do not admit the identity of logic and mathematics, we may challenge them to indicate at what point in the successive definitions and deductions of Principia Mathematica they consider that logic ends and mathematics begins. It will then be obvious that any answer is arbitrary.” The answer, “Section 120, in which Infinity is first assumed!,” is not arbitrary. In Principia Whitehead and Russell jocularly say of Infinity that they “prefer to keep it as a hypothesis.” Perhaps then they did not really take logicism to assert the above identity, but rather a correspondence: to each sentence f of mathematics there corresponds a conditional sentence of logic whose antecedent is the Axiom of Infinity and whose consequent is a purely logical reformulation of f. In spite of the problems with the “classical” versions of logicism, if we count so-called higherorder (at least second-order) logic as logic, and if we reformulate the thesis to read ‘Each area of mathematics is, or is part of, a logic’, logicism remains alive and well.

logistic system, a formal language together with a set of axioms and rules of inference, or what many today would call a “logic.” The original idea behind the notion of a logistic system was that the language, axioms, rules, and attendant concepts of proof and theorem were to be specified in a mathematically precise fashion, thus enabling one to make the study of deductive reasoning an exact science. One was to begin with an effective specification of the primitive symbols of the language and of which (finite) sequences of symbols were to count as sentences or wellformed formulas. Next, certain sentences were to be singled out effectively as axioms. The rules of inference were also to be given in such a manner that there would be an effective procedure for telling which rules are rules of the system and what inferences they license. A proof was then defined as any finite sequence of sentences, each of which is either an axiom or follows from some earlier line(s) by one of the rules, with a theorem being the last line of a proof. With the subsequent development of logic, the requirement of effectiveness has sometimes been dropped, as has the requirement that sentences and proofs be finite in length.

logos (plural: logoi) (Grecian, ‘word’, ‘speech’, ‘reason’), term with the following main philosophical senses. (1) Rule, principle, law. E.g., in Stoicism the logos is the divine order and in Neoplatonism the intelligible regulating forces displayed in the sensible world. The term came thus to refer, in Christianity, to the Word of God, to the instantiation of his agency in creation, and, in the New Testament, to the person of Christ. (2) Proposition, account, explanation, thesis, argument. E.g., Aristotle presents a logos from first principles. (3) Reason, reasoning, the rational faculty, abstract theory (as opposed to experience), discursive reasoning (as opposed to intuition). E.g., Plato’s Republic uses the term to refer to the intellectual part of the soul. (4) Measure, relation, proportion, ratio. E.g., Aristotle speaks of the logoi of the musical scales. (5) Value, worth. E.g., Heraclitus speaks of the man whose logos is greater than that of others.

longinus (late first century A.D.), Greek literary critic, author of a treatise On the Sublime (Peri hypsous). The work is ascribed to “Dionysius or Longinus” in the manuscript and is now tentatively dated to the end of the first century A.D. The author argues for five sources of sublimity in literature: (a) grandeur of thought and (b) deep emotion, both products of the writer’s “nature”; (c) figures of speech, (d) nobility and originality in word use, and (e) rhythm and euphony in diction, products of technical artistry. The passage on emotion is missing from the text. The treatise, with Aristotelian but enthusiastic spirit, throws light on the emotional effect of many great passages of Greek literature; noteworthy are its comments on Homer (ch. 9). Its nostalgic plea for an almost romantic independence and greatness of character and imagination in the poet and orator in an age of dictatorial government and somnolent peace is unique and memorable.

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

lottery paradox, a paradox involving two plausible assumptions about justification which yield the conclusion that a fully rational thinker may justifiably believe a pair of contradictory propositions. The unattractiveness of this conclusion has led philosophers to deny one or the other of the assumptions in question. The paradox, which is due to Henry Kyburg, is generated as follows. Suppose I am contemplating a fair lottery involving n tickets (for some suitably large n), and I justifiably believe that exactly one ticket will win. Assume that if the probability of p, relative to one’s evidence, meets some given high threshold less than 1, then one has justification for believing that p (and not merely justification for believing that p is highly probable). This is sometimes called a rule of detachment for inductive hypotheses. Then supposing that the number n of tickets is large enough, the rule implies that I have justification for believing (T1) that the first ticket will lose (since the probability of T1 (% (n † 1)/n) will exceed the given high threshold if n is large enough). By similar reasoning, I will also have justification for believing (T2) that the second ticket will lose, and similarly for each remaining ticket. Assume that if one has justification for believing that p and justification for believing that q, then one has justification for believing that p and q. This is a consequence of what is sometimes called “deductive closure for justification,” according to which one has justification for believing the deductive consequences of what one justifiably believes. Closure, then, implies that I have justification for believing that T1 and T2 and . . . Tn. But this conjunctive proposition is equivalent to the proposition that no ticket will win, and we began with the assumption that I have justification for believing that exactly one ticket will win.

lotze, philosopher and influential representative of post-Hegelian German metaphysics. Lotze was born in Bautzen and studied medicine, mathematics, physics, and philosophy at Leipzig, where he became instructor, first in medicine and later in philosophy. His early views, expressed in his Metaphysik and Logik, were influenced by C. H. Weisse, a former student of Hegel’s. He succeeded Herbart as professor of philosophy at Göttingen. His best-known work, Mikrocosmus. “Logik” and “Metaphysik” were published as two parts of his “System der Philosophie. While Lotze shared the metaphysical and systematic appetites of his German idealist predecessors, he rejected their intellectualism, favoring an emphasis on the primacy of feeling; believed that metaphysics must fully respect the methods, results, and “mechanistic” assumptions of the empirical sciences; and saw philosophy as the never completed attempt to raise and resolve questions arising from the inevitable pluralism of methods and interests involved in science, ethics, and the arts. A strong personalism is manifested in his assertion that feeling discloses to us a relation to a personal deity and its teleological workings in nature. His most enduring influences can be traced, in America, through Royce, B. P. Bowne, and James, and, in England, through Bosanquet and Bradley.

löwenheim-Skolem theorem, the result that for any set of sentences of standard predicate logic, if there is any interpretation in which they are all true, there there is also an interpretation whose domain consists of natural numbers and in which they are all true. Leopold Löwenheim proved in 1915 that for finite sets of sentences of standard predicate logic, if there is any interpretation in which they are true, there is also an interpretation that makes them true and where the domain is a subset of the domain of the first interpretation, and the new domain can be mapped one-to-one onto a set of natural numbers. Löwenheim’s proof contained some gaps and made essential but implicit use of the axiom of choice, a principle of set theory whose truth was, and is, a matter of debate. In fact, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem is equivalent to the axiom of choice. Thoralf Skolem, in 1920, gave a more detailed proof that made explicit the appeal to the axiom of choice and that extended the scope of the theorem to include infinite sets of sentences. In 1922 he gave an essentially different proof that did not depend on the axiom of choice and in which the domain consisted of natural numbers rather than being of the same size as a set of natural numbers. In most contemporary texts, Skolem’s result is proved by methods later devised by Gödel, Herbrand, or Henkin for proving other results. If the language does not include an identity predicate, then Skolem’s result is that the second domain consists of the entire set of natural numbers; if the language includes an identity predicate, then the second domain may be a proper subset of the natural numbers. (v. van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic). The original results were of interest because they showed that in many cases unexpected interpretations with smaller infinite domains than those of the initially given interpretation could be constructed. It was later shown – and this is the Upward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem – that interpretations with larger domains could also be constructed that rendered true the same set of sentences. Hence the theorem as stated initially is sometimes referred to as the Downward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem. The theorem was surprising because it was believed that certain sets of axioms characterized domains, such as the continuum of real numbers, that were larger than the set of natural numbers. This surprise is called Skolem’s paradox, but it is to be emphasized that this is a philosophical puzzle rather than a formal contradiction. Two main lines of response to the paradox developed early. The realist, who believes that the continuum exists independently of our knowledge or description of it, takes the theorem to show either that the full truth about the structure of the continuum is ineffable or at least that means other than standard first-order predicate logic are required. The constructivist, who believes that the continuum is in some sense our creation, takes the theorem to show that size comparisons among infinite sets is not an absolute matter, but relative to the particular descriptions given. Both positions have received various more sophisticated formulations that differ in details, but they remain the two main lines of development.

lucrezio: possibly the most important Italian philosopher -- lucretius: Roman poet, author of “De rerum natura,” an epic poem in six books. Lucretius’s emphasis, as an orthodox Epicurean, is on the role of even the most technical aspects of physics and philosophy in helping to attain emotional peace and dismiss the terrors of popular religion. Each book studies some aspect of the school’s theories, while purporting to offer elementary instruction to its addressee, Memmius. Each begins with an ornamental proem and ends with a passage of heightened emotional impact; the argumentation is adorned with illustrations from personal observation, frequently of the contemporary Roman and Italian scene. Book 1 demonstrates that nothing exists but an infinity of atoms moving in an infinity of void. Opening with a proem on the love of Venus and Mars (an allegory of the Roman peace), it ends with an image of Epicurus as conqueror, throwing the javelin of war outside the finite universe of the geocentric astronomers. Book 2 proves the mortality of all finite worlds; Book 3, after proving the mortality of the human soul, ends with a hymn on the theme that there is nothing to feel or fear in death. The discussion of sensation and thought in Book 4 leads to a diatribe against the torments of sexual desire. The shape and contents of the visible world are discussed in Book 5, which ends with an account of the origins of civilization. Book 6, about the forces that govern meteorological, seismic, and related phenomena, ends with a frightening picture of the plague of 429 B.C. at Athens. The unexpectedly gloomy end suggests the poem is incomplete (also the absence of two great Epicurean themes, friendship and the gods). Refs.: Lucretius, in The Stanford Encyclopaedia, Luigi Speranza, "Grice, Lucrezio, e la natura delle cose," per Il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

lukács: philosopher best known for his History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923). In 1918 he joined the Communist Party and for much of the remainder of his career had a controversial relationship with it. For several months in 1919 he was People’s Commissar for Education in Béla Kun’s government, until he fled to Vienna and later moved to Berlin. In 1933 he fled Hitler and moved to Moscow, remaining there until the end of World War II, when he returned to Budapest as a university professor. In 1956 he was Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy’s short-lived government. This led to a brief exile in Rumania. In his later years he returned to teaching in Budapest and was much celebrated by the Hungarian government. His Collected Works are forthcoming in both German and Hungarian. He is equally celebrated for his literary criticism and his reconstruction of the young Marx’s thought. For convenience his work is often divided into three periods: the pre-Marxist, the Stalinist, and the post-Stalinist. What unifies these periods and remains constant in his work are the problems of dialectics and the concept of totality. He stressed the Marxist claim of the possibility of a dialectical unity of subject and object. This was to be obtained through the proletariat’s realization of itself and the concomitant destruction of economic alienation in society, with the understanding that truth was a still-to-be-realized totality. (In the post–World War II period this theme was taken up by the Yugoslavian praxis theorists.) The young neo-Kantian Lukács presented an aesthetics stressing the subjectivity of human experience and the emptiness of social experience. This led several French philosophers to claim that he was the first major existentialist of the twentieth century; he strongly denied it. Later he asserted that realism is the only correct way to understand literary criticism, arguing that since humanity is at the core of any social discussion, form depends on content and the content of politics is central to all historical social interpretations of literature. Historically Lukács’s greatest claim to fame within Marxist circles came from his realization that Marx’s materialist theory of history and the resultant domination of the economic could be fully understood only if it allowed for both necessity and species freedom. In History and Class Consciousness he stressed Marx’s debt to Hegelian dialectics years before the discovery of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Lukács stresses his Hegelian Marxism as the correct orthodox version over and against the established Engels-inspired Soviet version of a dialectics of nature. His claim to be returning to Marx’s methodology emphasizes the primacy of the concept of totality. It is through Marx’s use of the dialectic that capitalist society can be seen as essentially reified and the proletariat viewed as the true subject of history and the only possible salvation of humanity. All truth is to be seen in relation to the proletariat’s historical mission. Marx’s materialist conception of history itself must be examined in light of proletarian knowledge. Truth is no longer given but must be understood in terms of relative moments in the process of the unfolding of the real union of theory and praxis: the totality of social relations. This union is not to be realized as some statistical understanding, but rather grasped through proletarian consciousness and directed party action in which subject and object are one. (Karl Mannheim included a modified version of this theory of social-historical relativism in his work on the sociology of knowledge.) In Europe and America this led to Western Marxism. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union it led to condemnation. If both the known and the knower are moments of the same thing, then there is a two-directional dialectical relationship, and Marxism cannot be understood from Engels’s one-way movement of the dialectic of nature. The Communist attack on Lukács was so extreme that he felt it necessary to write an apologetic essay on Lenin’s established views. In The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics (1938), Lukács modified his views but still stressed the dialectical commonality of Hegel and Marx. In Lukács’s last years he unsuccessfully tried to develop a comprehensive ethical theory. The positive result was over two thousand pages of a preliminary study on social ontology.

lukasiewicz: philosopher and logician, the most renowned member of the Warsaw School. The work for which he is best known is the discovery of many-valued logics, but he also invented bracket-free Polish notation; obtained original consistency, completeness, independence, and axiom-shortening results for sentential calculi; rescued Stoic logic from the misinterpretation and incomprehension of earlier historians and restored it to its rightful place as the first formulation of the theory of deduction; and finally incorporated Aristotle’s syllogisms, both assertoric and modal, into a deductive system in his work Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic. Reflection on Aristotle’s discussion of future contingency in On Interpretation led Lukasiewicz in 1918 to posit a third truth-value, possible, in addition to true and false, and to construct a formal three-valued logic. Where in his notation Cpq denotes ‘if p then q’, Np ‘not p’, Apq ‘either p or q’, and Kpq ‘both p and q’, the system is defined by the following matrices (½ is the third truthvalue): Apq is defined as CCpqq, and Kpq as NANpNq. The system was axiomatized by Wajsberg in 1931. Lukasiewicz’s motivation in constructing a formal system of three-valued logic was to break the grip of the idea of universal determinism on the imagination of philosophers and scientists. For him, there was causal determinism (shortly to be undermined by quantum theory), but there was also logical determinism, which in accordance with the principle of bivalence decreed that the statement that J.L. would be in Warsaw at noon on December 21 next year was either true or false now, and indeed had been either true or false for all time. In three-valued logic this statement would take the value ½, thus avoiding any apparent threat to free will posed by the law of bivalence.

lull, Raymond, also spelled Raymond Lully, Ramon Llull, mystic and missionary. A polemicist against Islam, a social novelist, and a constructor of schemes for international unification, Lull is best known in the history of philosophy for his quasialgebraic or combinatorial treatment of metaphysical principles. His logic of divine and creaturely attributes is set forth first in an Ars compendiosa inveniendi veritatem (1274), next in an Ars demonstrativa (1283–89), then in reworkings of both of these and in the Tree of Knowledge, and finally in the Ars brevis and the Ars generalis ultima (1309–16). Each of these contains tables and diagrams that permit the reader to calculate the interactions of the various principles. Although his dates place him in the period of mature Scholasticism, the vernacular language and the Islamic or Judaic construction of Lull’s works relegate him to the margin of Scholastic debates. His influence is to be sought rather in late medieval and Renaissance cabalistic or hermetic traditions.

luther: German religious reformer and leader of the Protestant Reformation. He was an Augustinian friar and unsystematic theologian from Saxony, schooled in nominalism (Ockham, Biel, Staupitz) and trained in biblical languages. Luther initially taught philosophy and subsequently Scripture (Romans, Galatians, Hebrews) at Wittenberg University. His career as a church reformer began with his public denunciation, in the 95 theses, of the sale of indulgences in October 1517. Luther produced three incendiary tracts: Appeal to the Nobility, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of a Christian Man (1520), which prompted his excommunication. At the 1521 Diet of Worms he claimed: “I am bound by the Scripture I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against my conscience. Here I stand, may God help me.” Despite his modernist stance on the primacy of conscience over tradition, the reformer broke with Erasmus over free will (De servo Arbitrio, 1525), championing an Augustinian, antihumanist position. His crowning achievement, the translation of the Bible into German (1534/45), shaped the modern German language. On the strength of a biblical-Christocentric, anti-philosophical theology, he proclaimed justification by faith alone and the priesthood of all believers. He unfolded a theologia crucis, reformed the Mass, acknowledged only two sacraments (baptism and the Eucharist), advocated consubstantiation instead of transubstantiation, and propounded the Two Kingdoms theory in church–state relations.

lycæum: an extensive sanctuary of Apollo just east off Athens (“so my “Athenian dialectic” has to be taken with a pinch of salt!”) -- the site of public athletic (or gymnastic) facilities where Aristotle teaches, a center for philosophy and systematic research in science and history organized there by Aristotle and his associates; it begins as an informal play group, lacking any legal status until Theophrastus, Aristotle’s colleague and principal heir, acquires land and buildings there. By a principle of metonymy common in philosophy (cf. ‘Academy’, ‘Oxford’, ‘Vienna’),‘Lycæum’ comes to refer collectively to members of the school and their methods and ideas, although the school remained relatively non-doctrinaire. Another ancient label for adherents of the school and their ideas, apparently derived from Aristotle’s habit of lecturing in a portico (peripatos) at the Lycæum, is ‘Peripatetic’. The school had its heyday in its first decades, when members include Eudemus, author of lost histories of mathematics; Aristoxenus, a prolific writer, principally on music (large parts of two treatises survive); Dicaearchus, a polymath who ranged from ethics and politics to psychology and geography; Meno, who compiled a history of medicine; and Demetrius of Phaleron, a dashing intellect who writes extensively and ruled Athens on behalf of dynasts. Under Theophrastus and his successor Strato, the Lycæum  produces original work, especially in natural science. But by the midthird century B.C., the Lycæum had lost its initial vigor. To judge from meager evidence, it offered sound education but few new ideas. Some members enjoyed political influence, but for nearly two centuries, rigorous theorizing is displaced by intellectual history and popular moralizing. In the first century B.C., the school enjoyed a modest renaissance when Andronicus oversaw the first methodical edition of Aristotle’s works and began the exegetical tradition that culminated in the monumental commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Oxonian dialectic and Athenian dialectic.”

lyotard: philosopher, a leading representative of post-structuralism. Among major post-structuralist theorists (Gilles Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault), Lyotard is most closely associated with post-modernism. With roots in phenomenology (a student of Merleau-Ponty, his first book, Phenomenology [1954], engages phenomenology’s history and engages phenomenology with history) and Marxism (in the 1960s Lyotard was associated with the Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, founded by Cornelius Castoriadis [1922–97] and Claude Lefort [b.1924]), Lyotard’s work has centered on questions of art, language, and politics. His first major work, Discours, figure (1971), expressed dissatisfaction with structuralism and, more generally, any theoretical approach that sought to escape history through appeal to a timeless, universal structure of language divorced from our experiences. Libidinal Economy (1974) reflects the passion and enthusiasm of the events of May 1968 along with a disappointment with the Marxist response to those events. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), an occasional text written at the request of the Quebec government, catapulted Lyotard to the forefront of critical debate. Here he introduced his definition of the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives”: the postmodern names not a specific epoch but an antifoundationalist attitude that exceeds the legitimating orthodoxy of the moment. Postmodernity, then, resides constantly at the heart of the modern, challenging those totalizing and comprehensive master narratives (e.g., the Enlightenment narrative of the emancipation of the rational subject) that serve to legitimate its practices. Lyotard suggests we replace these narratives by less ambitious, “little narratives” that refrain from totalizing claims in favor of recognizing the specificity and singularity of events. Many, including Lyotard, regard The Differend (1983) as his most original and important work. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Kant’s Critique of Judgment, it reflects on how to make judgments (political as well as aesthetic) where there is no rule of judgment to which one can appeal. This is the différend, a dispute between (at least) two parties in which the parties operate within radically heterogeneous language games so incommensurate that no consensus can be reached on principles or rules that could govern how their dispute might be settled. In contrast to litigations, where disputing parties share a language with rules of judgment to consult to resolve their dispute, différends defy resolution (an example might be the conflicting claims to land rights by aboriginal peoples and current residents). At best, we can express différends by posing the dispute in a way that avoids delegitimating either party’s claim. In other words, our political task, if we are to be just, is to phrase the dispute in a way that respects the difference between the competing claims. In the years following The Differend, Lyotard published several works on aesthetics, politics, and postmodernism; the most important may well be his reading of Kant’s third Critique in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991).

Mach: philosopher, born in Turas, Moravia, and studied at Vienna. Appointed professor of mathematics at Graz in 1864, he moved in 1867 to the chair of physics at Prague, where he came to be recognized as one of the leading scientists in Europe, contributing not only to a variety of fields of physics (optics, electricity, mechanics, acoustics) but also to the new field of psychophysics, particularly in the field of perception. He returned to Vienna in 1895 to a chair in philosophy, designated for a new academic discipline, the history and theory of inductive science. His writings on the philosophy of science profoundly affected the founders of the Vienna Circle, leading Mach to be regarded as a progenitor of logical positivism. His best-known work, The Science of Mechanics (1883), epitomized the main themes of his philosophy. He set out to extract the logical structure of mechanics from an examination of its history and procedures. Mechanics fulfills the human need to abridge the facts about motion in the most economical way. It rests on “sensations” (akin to the “ideas” or “sense impressions” of classical empiricism); indeed, the world may be said to consist of sensations (a thesis that later led Lenin in a famous polemic to accuse Mach of idealism). Mechanics is inductive, not demonstrative; it has no a priori element of any sort. The divisions between the sciences must be recognized to be arbitrary, a matter of convenience only. The sciences must be regarded as descriptive, not as explanatory. Theories may appear to explain, but the underlying entities they postulate, like atoms, for example, are no more than aids to prediction. To suppose them to represent reality would be metaphysical and therefore idle. Mach’s most enduring legacy to philosophy is his enduring suspicion of anything “metaphysical.”

Machiavelli: possibly Italy’s greateset philosopher -- the Italian political theorist commonly considered the most influential political thinker of the Renaissance. Born in Florence, he was educated in the civic humanist tradition. From 1498 to 1512, he was secretary to the second chancery of the republic of Florence, with responsibilities for foreign affairs and the revival of the domestic civic militia. His duties involved numerous diplomatic missions both in and outside Italy. With the fall of the republic in 1512, he was dismissed by the returning Medici regime. From 1513 to 1527 he lived in enforced retirement, relieved by writing and occasional appointment to minor posts. Machaivelli’s writings fall into two genetically connected categories: chancery writings (reports, memoranda, diplomatic writings) and formal books, the chief among them The Prince (1513), the Discourses (1517), the Art of War (1520), Florentine Histories (1525), and the comic drama Mandragola (1518). With Machiavelli a new vision emerges of politics as autonomous activity leading to the creation of free and powerful states. This vision derives its norms from what humans do rather than from what they ought to do. As a result, the problem of evil arises as a central issue: the political actor reserves the right “to enter into evil when necessitated.” The requirement of classical, medieval, and civic humanist political philosophies that politics must be practiced within the bounds of virtue is met by redefining the meaning of virtue itself. Machiavellian virtù is the ability to achieve “effective truth” regardless of moral, philosophical, and theological restraints. He recognizes two limits on virtù: (1) fortuna, understood as either chance or as a goddess symbolizing the alleged causal powers of the heavenly bodies; and (2) the agent’s own temperament, bodily humors, and the quality of the times. Thus, a premodern astrological cosmology and the anthropology and cyclical theory of history derived from it underlie his political philosophy. History is seen as the conjoint product of human activity and the alleged activity of the heavens, understood as the “general cause” of all human motions in the sublunar world. There is no room here for the sovereignty of the Good, nor the ruling Mind, nor Providence. Kingdoms, republics, and religions follow a naturalistic pattern of birth, growth, and decline. But, depending on the outcome of the struggle between virtù and fortuna, there is the possibility of political renewal; and Machiavelli saw himself as the philosopher of political renewal. Historically, Machiavelli’s philosophy came to be identified with Machiavellianism (also spelled Machiavellism), the doctrine that the reason of state recognizes no moral superior and that, in its pursuit, everything is permitted. Although Machiavelli himself does not use the phrase ‘reason of state’, his principles have been and continue to be invoked in its defense. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Machiavelli," per il club anglo-italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

macintyre: Like Kant, Scots philosopher and eminent contemporary representative of Aristotelian ethics. He was born in Scotland, educated in England, and has taught at universities in both England and (mainly) the United States. His early work included perceptive critical discussions of Marx and Freud as well as his influential A Short History of Ethics. His most discussed work, however, has been After Virtue (1981), an analysis and critique of modern ethical views from the standpoint of an Aristotelian virtue ethics. MacIntyre begins with the striking unresolvability of modern ethical disagreements, which he diagnoses as due to a lack of any shared substantive conception of the ethical good. This lack is itself due to the modern denial of a human nature that would provide a meaning and goal for human life. In the wake of the Enlightenment, MacIntyre maintains, human beings are regarded as merely atomistic individuals, employing a purely formal reason to seek fulfillment of their contingent desires. Modern moral theory tries to derive moral values from this conception of human reality. Utilitarians start from desires, arguing that they must be fulfilled in such a way as to provide the greatest happiness (utility). Kantians start from reason, arguing that our commitment to rationality requires recognizing the rights of others to the same goods that we desire for ourselves. MacIntyre, however, maintains that the modern notions of utility and of rights are fictions: there is no way to argue from individual desires to an interest in making others happy or to inviolable rights of all persons. He concludes that Enlightenment liberalism cannot construct a coherent ethics and that therefore our only alternatives are to accept a Nietzschean reduction of morality to will-to-power or to return to an Aristotelian ethics grounded in a substantive conception of human nature. MacIntyre’s positive philosophical project is to formulate and defend an Aristotelian ethics of the virtues (based particularly on the thought of Aquinas), where virtues are understood as the moral qualities needed to fulfill the potential of human nature. His aim is not the mere revival of Aristotelian thought but a reformulation and, in some cases, revision of that thought in light of its history over the last 2,500 years. MacIntyre pays particular attention to formulating concepts of practice (communal action directed toward a intrinsic good), virtue (a habit needed to engage successfully in a practice), and tradition (a historically extended community in which practices relevant to the fulfillment of human nature can be carried out). His conception of tradition is particularly noteworthy. His an effort to provide Aristotelianism with a historical orientation that Aristotle himself never countenanced; and, in contrast to Burke, it makes tradition the locus of rational reflection on and revision of past practices, rather than a merely emotional attachment to them. MacIntyre has also devoted considerable attention to the problem of rationally adjudicating the claims of rival traditions (especially in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 1988) and to making the case for the Aristotelian tradition as opposed to that of the Enlightenment and that of Nietzscheanism (especially in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, 1990).

mctaggart: Irish philosopher, the leading British personal idealist. Aside from his childhood and two extended visits to New Zealand, McTaggart lived in Cambridge as a student and fellow of Trinity College. His influence on others at Trinity, including Russell and Moore, was at times great, but he had no permanent disciples. He began formulating and defending his views by critically examining Hegel. In Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (1896) he argued that Hegel’s dialectic is valid but subjective, since the Absolute Idea Hegel used it to derive contains nothing corresponding to the dialectic. In Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (1901) he applied the dialectic to such topics as sin, punishment, God, and immortality. In his Commentary on Hegel’s Logic (1910) he concluded that the task of philosophy is to rethink the nature of reality using a method resembling Hegel’s dialectic. McTaggart attempted to do this in his major work, The Nature of Existence (two volumes, 1921 and 1927). In the first volume he tried to deduce the nature of reality from self-evident truths using only two empirical premises, that something exists and that it has parts. He argued that substances exist, that they are related to each other, that they have an infinite number of substances as parts, and that each substance has a sufficient description, one that applies only to it and not to any other substance. He then claimed that these conclusions are inconsistent unless the sufficient descriptions of substances entail the descriptions of their parts, a situation that requires substances to stand to their parts in the relation he called determining correspondence. In the second volume he applied these results to the empirical world, arguing that matter is unreal, since its parts cannot be determined by determining correspondence. In the most celebrated part of his philosophy, he argued that time is unreal by claiming that time presupposes a series of positions, each having the incompatible qualities of past, present, and future. He thought that attempts to remove the incompatibility generate a vicious infinite regress. From these and other considerations he concluded that selves are real, since their parts can be determined by determining correspondence, and that reality is a community of eternal, perceiving selves. He denied that there is an inclusive self or God in this community, but he affirmed that love between the selves unites the community producing a satisfaction beyond human understanding.

magnani – essential Italian philosopher, not to be confussed with Tenessee Williams’s favourite actress, Anna Magnani --. Refs. Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Magnani," per il Club Anglo-Italiano -- The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

magnitude, extent or size of a thing with respect to some attribute; technically, a quantity or dimension. A quantity is an attribute that admits of several or an infinite number of degrees, in contrast to a quality (e.g., triangularity), which an object either has or does not have. Measurement is assignment of numbers to objects in such a way that these numbers correspond to the degree or amount of some quantity possessed by their objects. The theory of measurement investigates the conditions for, and uniqueness of, such numerical assignments. Let D be a domain of objects (e.g., a set of physical bodies) and L be a relation on this domain; i.e., Lab may mean that if a and b are put on opposite pans of a balance, the pan with a does not rest lower than the other pan. Let ; be the operation of weighing two objects together in the same pan of a balance. We then have an empirical relational system E % ‹ D, L, ; (. One can prove that, if E satisfies specified conditions, then there exists a measurement function mapping D to a set Num of real numbers, in such a way that the L and ; relations between objects in D correspond to the m and ! relations between their numerical values. Such an existence theorem for a measurement function from an empirical relational system E to a numerical relational system, N % ‹ Num, m ! (, is called a representation theorem. Measurement functions are not unique, but a uniqueness theorem characterizes all such functions for a specified kind of empirical relational system and specified type of numerical image. For example, suppose that for any measurement functions f, g for E there exists real number a ( 0 such that for any x in D, f(x) % ag(x). Then it is said that the measurement is on a ratio scale, and the function s(x) % ax, for x in the real numbers, is the scale transformation. For some empirical systems, one can prove that any two measurement functions are related by f % ag ! b, where a ( 0 and b are real numbers. Then the measurement is on an interval scale, with the scale transformation s(x) % ax ! b; e.g., measurement of temperature without an absolute zero is on an interval scale. In addition to ratio and interval scales, other scale types are defined in terms of various scale transformations; many relational systems have been mathematically analyzed for possible applications in the behavioral sciences. Measurement with weak scale types may provide only an ordering of the objects, so quantitative measurement and comparative orderings can be treated by the same general methods. The older literature on measurement often distinguishes extensive from intensive magnitudes. In the former case, there is supposed to be an empirical operation (like ; above) that in some sense directly corresponds to addition on numbers. An intensive magnitude supposedly has no such empirical operation. It is sometimes claimed that genuine quantities must be extensive, whereas an intensive magnitude is a quality. This extensive versus intensive distinction (and its use in distinguishing quantities from qualities) is imprecise and has been supplanted by the theory of scale types sketched above.

maimon: philosopher who became the friend and protégé of Moses Mendelssohn and was an acute early critic and follower of Kant. His most important works were the Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie. Mit einem Anhang über die symbolische Erkenntnis, the Philosophisches Wörterbuch and the Versuch einer neuen Logik oder Theorie des Denkens. Maimon argued against the “thing-in-itself” as it was conceived by Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Gottlieb Ernst Schulze. For Maimon, the thing-in-itself was merely a limiting concept, not a real object “behind” the phenomena. While he thought that Kant’s system was sufficient as a refutation of rationalism or “dogmatism,” he did not think that it had – or could – successfully dispose of skepticism. Indeed, he advanced what can be called a skeptical interpretation of Kant. On the other hand, he also argued against Kant’s sharp distinction between sensibility and understanding and for the necessity of assuming the idea of an “infinite mind.” In this way, he prepared the way for Fichte and Hegel. However, in many ways his own theory is more similar to that of the neoKantian Hermann Cohen.

maimonides: philosopher, physician, and jurist. Born in Córdova, Maimonides and his family fled the forced conversions of the Almohad invasion in 1148, living anonymously in Fez before finding refuge in 1165 in Cairo. There Maimonides served as physician to the vizier of Saladin, who overthrew the Fatimid dynasty in 1171. He wrote ten medical treatises, but three works secured his position among the greatest rabbinic jurists: his Book of the Commandments, cataloguing the 613 biblical laws; his Commentary on the Mishnah, expounding the rational purposes of the ancient rabbinic code; and the fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah, a codification of Talmudic law that retains almost canonical authority. His Arabic philosophic masterpiece The Guide to the Perplexed mediates between the Scriptural and philosophic idioms, deriving a sophisticated negative theology by subtly decoding biblical anthropomorphisms. It defends divine creation against al-Farabi’s and Avicenna’s eternalism, while rejecting efforts to demonstrate creation apodictically. The radical occasionalism of Arabic dialectical theology (kalam) that results from such attempts, Maimonides argues, renders nature unintelligible and divine governance irrational: if God creates each particular event, natural causes are otiose, and much of creation is in vain. But Aristotle, who taught us the very principles of demonstration, well understood, as his resort to persuasive language reveals, that his arguments for eternity were not demonstrative. They project, metaphysically, an analysis of time, matter, and potentiality as they are now and ignore the possibility that at its origin a thing had a very different nature. We could allegorize biblical creation if it were demonstrated to be false. But since it is not, we argue that creation is more plausible conceptually and preferable theologically to its alternative: more plausible, because a free creative act allows differentiation of the world’s multiplicity from divine simplicity, as the seemingly mechanical necessitation of emanation, strictly construed, cannot do; preferable, because Avicennan claims that God is author of the world and determiner of its contingency are undercut by the assertion that at no time was nature other than it is now. Maimonides read the biblical commandments thematically, as serving to inform human character and understanding. He followed al-Farabi’s Platonizing reading of Scripture as a symbolic elaboration of themes best known to the philosopher. Thus he argued that prophets learn nothing new from revelation; the ignorant remain ignorant, but the gift of imagination in the wise, if they are disciplined by the moral virtues, especially courage and contentment, gives wing to ideas, rendering them accessible to the masses and setting them into practice. In principle, any philosopher of character and imagination might be a prophet; but in practice the legislative, ethical, and mythopoeic imagination that serves philosophy finds fullest articulation in one tradition. Its highest phase, where imagination yields to pure intellectual communion, was unique to Moses, elaborated in Judaism and its daughter religions. Maimonides’ philosophy was pivotal for later Jewish thinkers, highly valued by Aquinas and other Scholastics, studied by Spinoza in Hebrew translation, and annotated by Leibniz in Buxtorf’s 1629 rendering, Doctor Perplexorum.

malcolm: cited by Grice, profusely -- philosopher who was a prominent figure in post– World War II analytic philosophy and perhaps the foremost American interpreter and advocate of Wittgenstein. His association with Wittgenstein (vividly described in his Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir) began when he was at Cambridge. Other influences were Bouwsma, Malcolm’s tutor at Nebraska, and Moore, whom he knew at Cambridge. Malcolm taught at Cornell, and was associated with King’s, London. Malcolm’s earliest papers (e.g., “The Verification Argument,” and “Knowledge and Belief”) dealt with issues of knowledge and skepticism, and two dealt with Moore (The ones Grice is interested in). “Moore and Ordinary Language” infamously interprets Moore’s defense of common sense as a defense of ordinary (rather than ideal) language, but “Defending Common Sense” argued, -- “even more infamously” – Grice -- that Moore’s “two hands” proof of the external world involves a misuse of ‘know’ (“For surely it would be stupid of Moore to doubt that he has two hands.”). Moore’s proof is the topic of extended discussions between Malcolm and Vitters during the latter’s visit in Ithaca, and these provided the stimulus for Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Malcolm’s “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations” was a highly influential discussion of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and especially of his “private language argument.” Two other works of that period were Malcolm’s Dreaming which argued that dreams do not have genuine duration or temporal location, and do not entail having genuine experiences, and “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” which defended a version of the ontological argument. Malcolm, inspired by Grice, wrote extensively on memory, first in his “Three Lectures on Memory,” published in his Knowledge and Certainty, and then in his Memory and Mind. In the latter he criticized both Grice’s philosophical and psychological theories of memory, and argues that the notion of a memory trace “is not a scientific discovery . . . [but] a product of philosophical thinking, of a sort that is natural and enormously tempting, yet thoroughly muddled.” A recurrent theme in Malcolm’s thought was that philosophical understanding requires getting to the root of the temptations to advance some philosophical doctrine, and that once we do so we will see the philosophical doctrines as confused or nonsensical. Although he was convinced that dualism and other Cartesian views about the mind were thoroughly confused, he thought no better of contemporary materialist and Grice’s functionalist views – “One never knows what Malcolm thinks – he doesn’t show, he doesn’t tell!” – Grice -- and of current theorizing in psychology and linguistics (one essay is entitled “The Myth of Cognitive Processes and Structures”). He shared with Wittgenstein both an antipathy to scientism and a respect for religion. He shared with Moore an antipathy to obscurantism and a respect for common sense. Malcolm’s “Nothing Is Hidden” (or implicit) examines the relations between Wittgenstein’s earlier and later philosophies. His other essays include Problems of Mind, Thought and Knowledge, and Consciousness and Causality, the latter coauthored with Armstrong. “Malcolm’s writings are marked by an exceptionally lucid, direct, and vivid style, if I may myself say so.” – Grice. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Malcolm on Moore: the implicaturum.”

malebranche: philosopher, an important but unorthodox proponent of Cartesian philosophy. Malebranche was a priest of the Oratory, a religious order founded in 1611 by Cardinal Bérulle, who was favorably inclined toward Descartes. Malebranche himself became a Cartesian after reading Descartes’s physiological Treatise on Man in 1664, although he ultimately introduced crucial modifications into Cartesian ontology, epistemology, and physics. Malebranche’s most important philosophical work is The Search After Truth (1674), in which he presents his two most famous doctrines: the vision in God and occasionalism. He agrees with Descartes and other philosophers that ideas, or immaterial representations present to the mind, play an essential role in knowledge and perception. But whereas Descartes’s ideas are mental entities, or modifications of the soul, Malebranche argues that the ideas that function in human cognition are in God – they just are the essences and ideal archetypes that exist in the divine understanding. As such, they are eternal and independent of finite minds, and make possible the clear and distinct apprehension of objective, neccessary truth. Malebranche presents the vision in God as the proper Augustinian view, albeit modified in the light of Descartes’s epistemological distinction between understanding and sensation. The theory explains both our apprehension of universals and mathematical and moral principles, as well as the conceptual element that, he argues, necessarily informs our perceptual acquaintance with the world. Like Descartes’s theory of ideas, Malebranche’s doctrine is at least partly motivated by an antiskepticism, since God’s ideas cannot fail to reveal either eternal truths or the essences of things in the world created by God. The vision in God, however, quickly became the object of criticism by Locke, Arnauld, Foucher, and others, who thought it led to a visionary and skeptical idealism, with the mind forever enclosed by a veil of divine ideas. Malebranche is also the best-known proponent of occasionalism, the doctrine that finite created beings have no causal efficacy and that God alone is a true causal agent. Starting from Cartesian premises about matter, motion, and causation – according to which the essence of body consists in extension alone, motion is a mode of body, and a causal relation is a logically necessary relation between cause and effect – Malebranche argues that bodies and minds cannot be genuine causes of either physical events or mental states. Extended bodies, he claims, are essentially inert and passive, and thus cannot possess any motive force or power to cause and sustain motion. Moreover, there is no necessary connection between any mental state (e.g. a volition) or physical event and the bodily motions that usually follow it. Such necessity is found only between the will of an omnipotent being and its effects. Thus, all phenomena are directly and immediately brought about by God, although he always acts in a lawlike way and on the proper occasion. Malebranche’s theory of ideas and his occasionalism, as presented in the Search and the later Dialogues on Metaphysics (1688), were influential in the development of Berkeley’s thought; and his arguments for the causal theory foreshadow many of the considerations regarding causation and induction later presented by Hume. In addition to these innovations in Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology, Malebranche also modified elements of Descartes’s physics, most notably in his account of the hardness of bodies and of the laws of motion. In his other major work, the Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680), Malebranche presents a theodicy, an explanation of how God’s wisdom, goodness, and power are to be reconciled with the apparent imperfections and evils in the world. In his account, elements of which Leibniz borrows, Malebranche claims that God could have created a more perfect world, one without the defects that plague this world, but that this would have involved greater complexity in the divine ways. God always acts in the simplest way possible, and only by means of lawlike general volitions; God never acts by “particular” or ad hoc volitions. But this means that while on any particular occasion God could intervene and forestall an apparent evil that is about to occur by the ordinary courses of the laws of nature (e.g. a drought), God would not do so, for this would compromise the simplicity of God’s means. The perfection or goodness of the world per se is thus relativized to the simplicity of the laws of that world (or, which is the same thing, to the generality of the divine volitions that, on the occasionalist view, govern it). Taken together, the laws and the phenomena of the world form a whole that is most worthy of God’s nature – in fact, the best combination possible. Malebranche then extends this analysis to explain the apparent injustice in the distribution of grace among humankind. It is just this extension that initiated Arnauld’s attack and drew Malebranche into a long philosophical and theological debate that would last until the end of the century.

manichaeanism, also Manichaeism, a syncretistic religion founded by the Babylonian prophet Mani, who claimed a revelation from God and saw himself as a member of a line that included the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. In dramatic myths, Manichaeanism posited the good kingdom of God, associated with light, and the evil kingdom of Satan, associated with darkness. Awareness of light caused greed, hate, and envy in the darkness; this provoked an attack of darkness on light. In response the Father sent Primal Man, who lost the fight so that light and darkness were mixed. The Primal Man appealed for help, and the Living Spirit came to win a battle, making heaven and earth out of the corpses of darkness and freeing some capured light. A Third Messenger was sent; in response the power of darkness created Adam and Eve, who contained the light that still remained under his sway. Then Jesus was sent to a still innocent Adam who nonetheless sinned, setting in motion the reproductive series that yields humanity. This is the mythological background to the Manichaean account of the basic religious problem: the human soul is a bit of captured light, and the problem is to free the soul from darkness through asceticism and esoteric knowledge. Manichaeanism denies that Jesus was crucified, and Augustine, himself a sometime Manichaean, viewed the religion as a Docetic heresy that denies the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity in a real human body. The religion exhibits the pattern of escape from embodiment as a condition of salvation, also seen in Hinduism and Buddhism.

mannheim, Karl (1893–1947), Hungarian-born German social scientist best known for his sociology of knowledge. Born in Budapest, where he took a university degree in philosophy, he settled in Heidelberg in 1919 as a private scholar until his call to Frankfurt as professor of sociology in 1928. Suspended as a Jew and as foreign-born by the Nazis in 1933, he accepted an invitation from the London School of Economics, where he was a lecturer for a decade. In 1943, Mannheim became the first professor of sociology of education at the University of London, a position he held until his death. Trained in the Hegelian tradition, Mannheim defies easy categorization: his mature politics became those of a liberal committed to social planning; with his many studies in the sociology of culture, of political ideologies, of social organization, of education, and of knowledge, among others, he founded several subdisciplines in sociology and political science. While his Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940) expressed his own commitment to social planning, his most famous work, Ideology and Utopia (original German edition, 1929; revised English edition, 1936), established sociology of knowledge as a scientific enterprise and simultaneously cast doubt on the possibility of the very scientific knowledge on which social planning was to proceed. As developed by Mannheim, sociology of knowledge attempts to find the social causes of beliefs as contrasted with the reasons people have for them. Mannheim seemed to believe that this investigation both presupposes and demonstrates the impossibility of “objective” knowledge of society, a theme that relates sociology of knowledge to its roots in German philosophy and social theory (especially Marxism) and earlier in the thought of the idéologues of the immediate post–French Revolution decades.

mansel: philosopher, a prominent defender of Scottish common sense philosophy. Mansel was the Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy and ecclesiastical history at Oxford, and the dean of St. Paul’s. Much of his philosophy was derived from Kant as interpreted by Hamilton. In “Prolegomena Logica,” Mansel defines logic as the science of the laws of thought, while in “Metaphysics,” he argues that human faculties are not suited to know the ultimate nature of things. He drew the religious implications of these views in his most influential work, The Limits of Religious Thought, by arguing that God is rationally inconceivable and that the only available conception of God is an analogical one derived from revelation. From this he concluded that religious dogma is immune from rational criticism. In the ensuing controversy Mansel was criticized by Spenser, Thomas Henry Huxley, and J. S. Mill.

many-valued logic, a logic that rejects the principle of bivalence: every proposition is true or false. However, there are two forms of rejection: the truth-functional mode (many-valued logic proper), where propositions may take many values beyond simple truth and falsity, values functionally determined by the values of their components; and the truth-value gap mode, in which the only values are truth and falsity, but propositions may have neither. What value they do or do not have is not determined by the values or lack of values of their constituents. Many-valued logic has its origins in the work of Lukasiewicz and (independently) Post around 1920, in the first development of truth tables and semantic methods. Lukasiewicz’s philosophical motivation for his three-valued calculus was to deal with propositions whose truth-value was open or “possible” – e.g., propositions about the future. He proposed they might take a third value. Let 1 represent truth, 0 falsity, and the third value be, say, ½. We take Ý (not) and P (implication) as primitive, letting v(ÝA) % 1 † v(A) and v(A P B) % min(1,1 † v(A)!v(B)). These valuations may be displayed: Lukasiewicz generalized the idea in 1922, to allow first any finite number of values, and finally infinitely, even continuum-many values (between 0 and 1). One can then no longer represent the functionality by a matrix; however, the formulas given above can still be applied. Wajsberg axiomatized Lukasiewicz’s calculus in 1931. In 1953 Lukasiewicz published a four-valued extensional modal logic. In 1921, Post presented an m-valued calculus, with values 0 (truth), . . . , m † 1 (falsity), and matrices defined on Ý and v (or): v(ÝA) % 1 ! v(A) (modulo m) and v(AvB) % min (v(A),v(B)). Translating this for comparison into the same framework as above, we obtain the matrices (with 1 for truth and 0 for falsity): The strange cyclic character of Ý makes Post’s system difficult to interpret – though he did give one in terms of sequences of classical propositions. A different motivation led to a system with three values developed by Bochvar in 1939, namely, to find a solution to the logical paradoxes. (Lukasiewicz had noted that his three-valued system was free of antinomies.) The third value is indeterminate (so arguably Bochvar’s system is actually one of gaps), and any combination of values one of which is indeterminate is indeterminate; otherwise, on the determinate values, the matrices are classical. Thus we obtain for Ý and P, using 1, ½, and 0 as above: In order to develop a logic of many values, one needs to characterize the notion of a thesis, or logical truth. The standard way to do this in manyvalued logic is to separate the values into designated and undesignated. Effectively, this is to reintroduce bivalence, now in the form: Every proposition is either designated or undesignated. Thus in Lukasiewicz’s scheme, 1 (truth) is the only designated value; in Post’s, any initial segment 0, . . . , n † 1, where n‹m (0 as truth). In general, one can think of the various designated values as types of truth, or ways a proposition may be true, and the undesignated ones as ways it can be false. Then a proposition is a thesis if and only if it takes only designated values. For example, p P p is, but p 7 Ýp is not, a Lukasiewicz thesis. However, certain matrices may generate no logical truths by this method, e.g., the Bochvar matrices give ½ for every formula any of whose variables is indeterminate. If both 1 and ½ were designated, all theses of classical logic would be theses; if only 1, no theses result. So the distinction from classical logic is lost. Bochvar’s solution was to add an external assertion and negation. But this in turn runs the risk of undercutting the whole philosophical motivation, if the external negation is used in a Russell-type paradox. One alternative is to concentrate on consequence: A is a consequence of a set of formulas X if for every assignment of values either no member of X is designated or A is. Bochvar’s consequence relation (with only 1 designated) results from restricting classical consequence so that every variable in A occurs in some member of X. There is little technical difficulty in extending many-valued logic to the logic of predicates and quantifiers. For example, in Lukasiewicz’s logic, v(E xA) % min {v(A(a/x)): a 1. D}, where D is, say, some set of constants whose assignments exhaust the domain. This interprets the universal quantifier as an “infinite” conjunction. In 1965, Zadeh introduced the idea of fuzzy sets, whose membership relation allows indeterminacies: it is a function into the unit interval [0,1], where 1 means definitely in, 0 definitely out. One philosophical application is to the sorites paradox, that of the heap. Instead of insisting that there be a sharp cutoff in number of grains between a heap and a non-heap, or between red and, say, yellow, one can introduce a spectrum of indeterminacy, as definite applications of a concept shade off into less clear ones. Nonetheless, many have found the idea of assigning further definite values, beyond truth and falsity, unintuitive, and have instead looked to develop a scheme that encompasses truthvalue gaps. One application of this idea is found in Kleene’s strong and weak matrices of 1938. Kleene’s motivation was to develop a logic of partial functions. For certain arguments, these give no definite value; but the function may later be extended so that in such cases a definite value is given. Kleene’s constraint, therefore, was that the matrices be regular: no combination is given a definite value that might later be changed; moreover, on the definite values the matrices must be classical. The weak matrices are as for Bochvar. The strong matrices yield (1 for truth, 0 for falsity, and u for indeterminacy): An alternative approach to truth-value gaps was presented by Bas van Fraassen in the 1960s. Suppose v(A) is undefined if v(B) is undefined for any subformula B of A. Let a classical extension of a truth-value assignment v be any assignment that matches v on 0 and 1 and assigns either 0 or 1 whenever v assigns no value. Then we can define a supervaluation w over v: w(A) % 1 if the value of A on all classical extensions of v is 1, 0 if it is 0 and undefined otherwise. A is valid if w(A) % 1 for all supervaluations w (over arbitrary valuations). By this method, excluded middle, e.g., comes out valid, since it takes 1 in all classical extensions of any partial valuation. Van Fraassen presented several applications of the supervaluation technique. One is to free logic, logic in which empty terms are admitted.

mao Tse-tung: Chinese Communist leader, founder of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. He believed that Marxist ideas must be adapted to China. Contrary to the Marxist orthodoxy, which emphasized workers, Mao organized peasants in the countryside. His philosophical writings include On Practice (1937) and On Contradiction (1937), synthesizing dialectical materialism and traditional Chinese philosophy. In his later years he departed from the gradual strategy of his On New Democracy (1940) and adopted increasingly radical means to change China. Finally he started the Cultural Revolution in 1967 and plunged China into disaster.

marcel, Gabriel (1889–1973), French philosopher and playwright, a major representative of French existential thought. He was a member of the Academy of Political and Social Science of the Institute of France. Musician, drama critic, and lecturer of international renown, he authored thirty plays and as many philosophic essays. He considered his principal contribution to be that of a philosopher-dramatist. Together, his dramatic and philosophic works cut a path for Mao Tse-tung Marcel, Gabriel 534 4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 534 the reasoned exercise of freedom to enhance the dignity of human life. The conflicts and challenges of his own life he brought to the light of the theater; his philosophic works followed as efforts to discern critically through rigorous, reasoned analyses the alternative options life offers. His dramatic masterpiece, The Broken World, compassionately portrayed the devastating sense of emptiness, superficial activities, and fractured relationships that plague the modern era. This play cleared a way for Marcel to transcend nineteenth-century British and German idealism, articulate his distinction between problem and mystery, and evolve an existential approach that reflectively clarified mysteries that can provide depth and meaningfulness to human life. In the essay “On the Ontological Mystery,” a philosophic sequel to The Broken World, Marcel confronted the questions “Who am I? – Is Being empty or full?” He explored the regions of body or incarnate being, intersubjectivity, and transcendence. His research focused principally on intersubjectivity clarifying the requisite attitudes and essential characteristics of I-Thou encounters, interpersonal relations, commitment and creative fidelity – notions he also developed in Homo Viator (1945) and Creative Fidelity (1940). Marcel’s thought balanced despair and hope, infidelity and fidelity, self-deception and a spirit of truth. He recognized both the role of freedom and the role of fundamental attitudes or prephilosophic dispositions, as these influence one’s way of being and the interpretation of life’s meaning. Concern for the presence of loved ones who have died appears in both Marcel’s dramatic and philosophic works, notably in Presence and Immortality. This concern, coupled with his reflections on intersubjectivity, led him to explore how a human subject can experience the presence of God or the presence of loved ones from beyond death. Through personal experience, dramatic imagination, and philosophic investigation, he discovered that such presence can be experienced principally by way of inwardness and depth. “Presence” is a spiritual influx that profoundly affects one’s being, uplifting it and enriching one’s personal resources. While it does depend on a person’s being open and permeable, presence is not something that the person can summon forth. A conferral or presence is always a gratuitous gift, coauthored and marked by its signal benefit, an incitement to create. So Marcel’s reflection on interpersonal communion enabled him to conceive philosophically how God can be present to a person as a life-giving and personalizing force whose benefit is always an incitement to create.

marc’aurelio: Italian philosopher – one of the most important ones – Vide his letters to his tutor Frontino -- Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor (from 161) and philosopher. Author of twelve books of Meditations (Greek title, To Himself), Marcus Aurelius is principally interesting in the history of Stoic philosophy (of which he was a diligent student) for his ethical self-portrait. Except for the first book, detailing his gratitude to his family, friends, and teachers, the aphorisms are arranged in no order; many were written in camp during military campaigns. They reflect both the Old Stoa and the more eclectic views of Posidonius, with whom he holds that involvement in public affairs is a moral duty. Marcus, in accord with Stoicism, considers immortality doubtful; happiness lies in patient acceptance of the will of the panentheistic Stoic God, the material soul of a material universe. Anger, like all emotions, is forbidden the Stoic emperor: he exhorts himself to compassion for the weak and evil among his subjects. “Do not be turned into ‘Caesar,’ or dyed by the purple: for that happens” (6.30). “It is the privilege of a human being to love even those who stumble” (7.22). Sayings like these, rather than technical arguments, give the book its place in literary history. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice, Marc'Aurelio e Frontino,” per il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

Marcuse: philosopher who reinterpreted the ideas of Marx and Freud. Marcuse’s work is among the most systematic and philosophical of the Frankfurt School theorists. After an initial attempt to unify Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger in an ontology of historicity in his habilitation on Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (1932), Marcuse was occupied during the 1930s with the problem of truth in a critical historical social theory, defending a contextindependent notion of truth against relativizing tendencies of the sociology of knowledge. Marcuse thought Hegel’s “dialectics” provided an alternative to relativism, empiricism, and positivism and even developed a revolutionary interpretation of the Hegelian legacy in Reason and Revolution (1941) opposed to Popper’s totalitarian one. After World War II, Marcuse appropriated Freud in the same way that he had appropriated Hegel before the war, using his basic concepts for a critical theory of the repressive character of civilization in Eros and Civilization (1955). In many respects, this book comes closer to presenting a positive conception of reason and Enlightenment than any other work of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse argued that civilization has been antagonistic to happiness and freedom through its constant struggle against basic human instincts. According to Marcuse, human existence is grounded in Eros, but these impulses depend upon and are shaped by labor. By synthesizing Marx and Freud, Marcuse holds out the utopian possibility of happiness and freedom in the unity of Eros and labor, which at the very least points toward the reduction of “surplus repression” as the goal of a rational economy and emancipatory social criticism. This was also the goal of his aesthetic theory as developed in The Aesthetic Dimension (1978). In One Dimensional Man (1964) and other writings, Marcuse provides an analysis of why the potential for a free and rational society has never been realized: in the irrationality of the current social totality, its creation and manipulation of false needs (or “repressive desublimation”), and hostility toward nature. Perhaps no other Frankfurt School philosopher has had as much popular influence as Marcuse, as evidenced by his reception in the student and ecology movements.

Mariana: Jesuit historian and political philosopher. Born in Talavera de la Reina, he studied at Alcalá de Henares and taught at Rome, Sicily, and Paris. His political ideas are contained in De rege et regis institutione and De monetae mutatione. Mariana held that political power rests on the community of citizens, and the power of the monarch derives from the people. The natural state of humanity did not include, as Vitoria held, government and other political institutions. The state of nature was one of justice in which all possessions were held in common, and cooperation characterized human relations. Private property is the result of technological advances that produced jealousy and strife. Antedating both Hobbes and Rousseau, Mariana argued that humans made a contract and delegated their political power to leaders in order to eliminate injustice and strife. However, only the people have the right to change the law. A monarch who does not follow the law and ceases to act for the citizens’ welfare may be forcibly removed. Tyrannicide is thus justifiable under some circumstances.

Maritain: philosopher whose innovative interpretation of Aquinas’s philosophy made him a central figure in Neo-Thomism. Bergson’s teaching saved him from metaphysical despair and a suicide pact with his fiancée. After his discovery of Aquinas, he rejected Bergsonism for a realistic account of the concept and a unified theory of knowledge, aligning the empirical sciences with the philosophy of nature, metaphysics, theology, and mysticism in Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge (1932). Maritain opposed the skepticism and idealism that severed the mind from sensibility, typified by the “angelism” of Descartes’s intuitionism. Maritain traced the practical effects of angelism in art, politics, and religion. His Art and Scholasticism (1920) employs ancient and medieval notions of art as a virtue and beauty as a transcendental aspect of being. In politics, especially Man and the State (1961), Maritain stressed the distinction between the person and the individual, the ontological foundation of natural rights, the religious origins of the democratic ideal, and the importance of the common good. He also argued for the possibility of philosophy informed by the data of revelation without compromising its integrity, and an Integral Humanism (1936) that affirms the political order while upholding the eternal destiny of the human person.

marrameo: essential Italian philosopher -- Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Marrameo," The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

marsilius: of Inghen -- not to be confused with Marsilius (Marsilio) of Padua (Padova),  philosopher, born near Nijmegen, Marsilius studied under Buridan, taught at Paris, then moved to the newly founded ‘studium generale’ at Heidelberg, where he and Albert of Saxony established nominalism in Germany. In logic, he produced an Ockhamist revision of the Tractatus of Peter of Spain, often published as Textus dialectices in early sixteenthcentury Germany, and a commentary on Aristotle’s Prior Analytics. He developed Buridan’s theory of impetus in his own way, accepted Bradwardine’s account of the proportions of velocities, and adopted Nicholas of Oresme’s doctrine of intension and remission of forms, applying the new physics in his commentaries on Aristotle’s physical works. In theology he followed Ockham’s skeptical emphasis on faith, allowing that one might prove the existence of God along Scotistic lines, but insisting that, since natural philosophy could not accommodate the creation of the universe ex nihilo, God’s omnipotence was known only through faith.

Mainardini -- Marsilius of Padua, in Italian, Marsilio dei Mainardini (1275/80–1342), Italian political theorist. He served as rector of the University of Paris between 1312 and 1313; his anti-papal views forced him to flee Paris (1326) for Nuremberg, where he was political and ecclesiastic adviser of Louis of Bavaria. His major work, Defensor pacis (“Defender of Peace,” 1324), attacks the doctrine of the supremacy of the pope and argues that the authority of a secular ruler elected to represent the people is superior to the authority of the papacy and priesthood in both temporal and spiritual affairs. Three basic claims of Marsilius’s theory are that reason, not instinct or God, allows us to know what is just and conduces to the flourishing of human society; that governments need to enforce obedience to the laws by coercive measures; and that political power ultimately resides in the people. He was influenced by Aristotle’s ideal of the state as necessary to foster human flourishing. His thought is regarded as a major step in the history of political philosophy and one of the first defenses of republicanism.

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

martineau: English philosopher of religion and ethical intuitionist. As a minister and a professor, Martineau defended Unitarianism and opposed pantheism. In A Study of Religion (1888) Martineau agreed with Kant that reality as we experience it is the work of the mind, but he saw no reason to doubt his intuitive conviction that the phenomenal world corresponds to a real world of enduring, causally related objects. He believed that the only intelligible notion of causation is given by willing and concluded that reality is the expression of a divine will that is also the source of moral authority. In Types of Ethical Theory he claimed that the fundamental fact of ethics is the human tendency to approve and disapprove of the motives leading to voluntary actions, actions in which there are two motives present to consciousness. After freely choosing one of the motives, the agent can determine which action best expresses it. Since Martineau thought that agents intuitively know through conscience which motive is higher, the core of his ethical theory is a ranking of the thirteen principal motives, the highest of which is reverence.

Marx: cf. Grice, “Ontological marxism.” German social philosopher, economic theorist, and revolutionary. He lived and worked as a journalist in Cologne, Paris, and Brussels. After the unsuccessful 1848 revolutions in Europe, he settled in London, doing research and writing and earning some money as correspondent for the New York Tribune. In early writings, he articulated his critique of the religiously and politically conservative implications of the then-reigning philosophy of Hegel, finding there an acceptance of existing private property relationships and of the alienation generated by them. Marx understood alienation as a state of radical disharmony (1) among individuals, (2) between them and their own life activity, or labor, and (3) between individuals and their system of production. Later, in his masterwork Capital (1867, 1885, 1894), Marx employed Hegel’s method of dialectic to generate an internal critique of the theory and practice of capitalism, showing that, under assumptions (notably that human labor is the source of economic value) found in such earlier theorists as Adam Smith, this system must undergo increasingly severe crises, resulting in the eventual seizure of control of the increasingly centralized means of production (factories, large farms, etc.) from the relatively small class of capitalist proprietors by the previously impoverished non-owners (the proletariat) in the interest of a thenceforth classless society. Marx’s early writings, somewhat utopian in tone, most never published during his lifetime, emphasize social ethics and ontology. In them, he characterizes his position as a “humanism” and a “naturalism.” In the Theses on Feuerbach, he charts a middle path between Hegel’s idealist account of the nature of history as the selfunfolding of spirit and what Marx regards as the ahistorical, mechanistic, and passive materialist philosophy of Feuerbach; Marx proposes a conception of history as forged by human activity, or praxis, within determinate material conditions that vary by time and place. In later Marxism, this general position is often labeled dialectical materialism. Marx began radically to question the nature of philosophy, coming to view it as ideology, i.e., a thought system parading as autonomous but in fact dependent on the material conditions of the society in which it is produced. The tone of Capital is therefore on the whole less philosophical and moralistic, more social scientific and tending toward historical determinism, than that of the earlier writings, but punctuated by bursts of indignation against the baneful effects of capitalism’s profit orientation and references to the “society of associated producers” (socialism or communism) that would, or could, replace capitalist society. His enthusiastic predictions of immanent worldwide revolutionary changes, in various letters, articles, and the famous Communist Manifesto (1848; jointly authored with his close collaborator, Friedrich Engels), depart from the generally more hypothetical character of the text of Capital itself. The linchpin that perhaps best connects Marx’s earlier and later thought and guarantees his enduring relevance as a social philosopher is his analysis of the role of human labor power as a peculiar type of commodity within a system of commodity exchange (his theory of surplus value). Labor’s peculiarity, according to him, lies in its capacity actively to generate more exchange value than it itself costs employers as subsistence wages. But to treat human beings as profit-generating commodities risks neglecting to treat them as human beings. Marxism, the philosophy of Karl Marx, or any of several systems of thought or approaches to social criticism derived from Marx. The term is also applied, incorrectly, to certain sociopolitical structures created by dominant Communist parties during the mid-twentieth century. Karl Marx himself, apprised of the ideas of certain French critics who invoked his name, remarked that he knew at least that he was not a Marxist. The fact that his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, a popularizer with a greater interest than Marx in the natural sciences, outlived him and wrote, among other things, a “dialectics of nature” that purported to discover certain universal natural laws, added to the confusion. Lenin, the leading Russian Communist revolutionary, near the end of his life discovered previously unacknowledged connections between Marx’s Capital (1867) and Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812–16) and concluded (in his Philosophical Notebooks) that Marxists for a half-century had not understood Marx. Specific political agendas of, among others, the Marxist faction within the turn-of-the-century German Social Democratic Party, the Bolshevik faction of Russian socialists led by Lenin, and later governments and parties claiming allegiance to “Marxist-Leninist principles” have contributed to reinterpretations. For several decades in the Soviet Union and countries allied with it, a broad agreement concerning fundamental Marxist doctrines was established and politically enforced, resulting in a doctrinaire version labeled “orthodox Marxism” and virtually ensuring the widespread, wholesale rejection of Marxism as such when dissidents taught to accept this version as authentic Marxism came to power. Marx never wrote a systematic exposition of his thought, which in any case drastically changed emphases across time and included elements of history, economics, and sociology as well as more traditional philosophical concerns. In one letter he specifically warns against regarding his historical account of Western capitalism as a transcendental analysis of the supposedly necessary historical development of any and all societies at a certain time. It is thus somewhat paradoxical that Marxism is often identified as a “totalizing” if not “totalitarian” system by postmodernist philosophers who reject global theories or “grand narratives” as inherently invalid. However, the evolution of Marxism since Marx’s time helps explain this identification. That “orthodox” Marxism would place heavy emphasis on historical determinism – the inevitability of a certain general sequence of events leading to the replacement of capitalism by a socialist economic system (in which, according to a formula in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, each person would be remunerated according to his/her work) and eventually by a communist one (remuneration in accordance with individual needs) – was foreshadowed by Plekhanov. In The Role of the Individual in History, he portrayed individual idiosyncrasies as accidental: e.g., had Napoleon not existed the general course of history would not have turned out differently. In Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Lenin offered epistemological reinforcement for the notion that Marxism is the uniquely true worldview by defending a “copy” or “reflection” theory of knowledge according to which true concepts simply mirror objective reality, like photographs. Elsewhere, however, he argued against “economism,” the inference that the historical inevitability of communism’s victory obviated political activism. Lenin instead maintained that, at least under the repressive political conditions of czarist Russia, only a clandestine party of professional revolutionaries, acting as the vanguard of the working class and in its interests, could produce fundamental change. Later, during the long political reign of Josef Stalin, the hegemonic Communist Party of the USSR was identified as the supreme interpreter of these interests, thus justifying totalitarian rule. So-called Western Marxism opposed this “orthodox” version, although the writings of one of its foremost early representatives, Georg Lukacs, who brilliantly perceived the close connection between Hegel’s philosophy and the early thought of Marx before the unpublished manuscripts proving this connection had been retrieved from archives, actually tended to reinforce both the view that the party incarnated the ideal interests of the proletariat (see his History and Class Consciousness) and an aesthetics favoring the art of “socialist realism” over more experimental forms. His contemporary, Karl Korsch, in Marxism as Philosophy, instead saw Marxism as above all a heuristic method, pointing to salient phenomena (e.g., social class, material conditioning) generally neglected by other philosophies. His counsel was in effect followed by the Frankfurt School of critical theory, including Walter Benjamin in the area of aesthetics, Theodor Adorno in social criticism, and Wilhelm Reich in psychology. A spate of “new Marxisms” – the relative degrees of their fidelity to Marx’s original thought cannot be weighed here – developed, especially in the wake of the gradual rediscovery of Marx’s more ethically oriented, less deterministic early writings. Among the names meriting special mention in this context are Ernst Bloch, who explored Marxism’s connection with utopian thinking; Herbert Marcuse, critic of the “one-dimensionality” of industrial society; the Praxis school (after the name of their journal and in view of their concern with analyzing social practices) of Yugoslav philosophers; and the later Jean-Paul Sartre. Also worthy of note are the writings, many of them composed in prison under Mussolini’s Italian Fascist rule, of Antonio Gramsci, who stressed the role of cultural factors in determining what is dominant politically and ideologically at any given time. Simultaneous with the decline and fall of regimes in which “orthodox Marxism” was officially privileged has been the recent development of new approaches, loosely connected by virtue of their utilization of techniques favored by British and American philosophers, collectively known as analytic Marxism. Problems of justice, theories of history, and the questionable nature of Marx’s theory of surplus value have been special concerns to these writers. This development suggests that the current unfashionableness of Marxism in many circles, due largely to its understandable but misleading identification with the aforementioned regimes, is itself only a temporary phenomenon, even if future Marxisms are likely to range even further from Marx’s own specific concerns while still sharing his commitment to identifying, explaining, and criticizing hierarchies of dominance and subordination, particularly those of an economic order, in human society. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Ontological marxim.”

materia et forma. If anything characterizes ‘analytic’ philosophy, then it is presumably the emphasis placed on analysis. But as history shows, there is a wide range of conceptions of analysis, so such a characterization says nothing that would distinguish analytic philosophy from much of what has either preceded or developed alongside it. Given that the decompositional conception is usually offered as the main conception, it might be thought that it is this that characterizes analytic philosophy, even Oxonian 'informalists' like Strawson.But this conception was prevalent in the early modern period, shared by both the British Empiricists and Leibniz, for example. Given that Kant denied the importance of de-compositional analysis, however, it might be suggested that what characterizes analytic philosophy is the value it places on such analysis. This might be true of G. E. Moore's early work, and of one strand within analytic philosophy; but it is not generally true. What characterizes analytic philosophy as it was founded by Frege and Russell is the role played by logical analysis, which depended on the development of modern logic. Although other and subsequent forms of analysis, such as 'linguistic' analysis, were less wedded to systems of FORMAL logic, the central insight motivating logical analysis remained.  Pappus's account of method in ancient Greek geometry suggests that the regressive conception of analysis was dominant at the time — however much other conceptions may also have been implicitly involved.In the early modern period, the decompositional conception became widespread.What characterizes analytic philosophy—or at least that central strand that originates in the work of Frege and Russell—is the recognition of what was called earlier the transformative or interpretive dimension of analysis.Any analysis presupposes a particular framework of interpretation, and work is done in interpreting what we are seeking to analyze as part of the process of regression and decomposition. This may involve transforming it in some way, in order for the resources of a given theory or conceptual framework to be brought to bear. Euclidean geometry provides a good illustration of this. But it is even more obvious in the case of analytic geometry, where the geometrical problem is first ‘translated’ into the language of algebra and arithmetic in order to solve it more easily.What Descartes and Fermat did for analytic geometry, Frege and Russell did for analytic PHILOSOPHY. Analytic philosophy is ‘analytic’ much more in the way that analytic geometry (as Fermat's and Descartes's) is ‘analytic’ than in the crude decompositional sense that Kant understood it.  The interpretive dimension of philosophical analysis can also be seen as anticipated in medieval scholasticism and it is remarkable just how much of modern concerns with propositions, meaning, reference, and so on, can be found in the medieval literature. Interpretive analysis is also illustrated in the nineteenth century by Bentham's conception of paraphrasis, which he characterized as "that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity." Bentham, a palaeo-Griceian, applies the idea in ‘analyzing away’ talk of ‘obligations’, and the anticipation that we can see here of Russell's theory of descriptions has been noted by, among others, Wisdom and Quine in ‘Five Milestones of Empiricism.'vide: Wisdom on Bentham as palaeo-Griceian.What was crucial in analytic philosophy, however, was the development of quantificational theory, which provided a far more powerful interpretive system than anything that had hitherto been available. In the case of Frege and Russell, the system into which statements were ‘translated’ was predicate calculus, and the divergence that was thereby opened up between the 'matter' and the logical 'form' meant that the process of 'translation' (or logical construction or deconstruction) itself became an issue of philosophical concern. This induced greater self-consciousness about our use of language and its potential to mislead us (the infamous implicaturums, which are neither matter nor form -- they are IMPLICATED matter, and the philosopher may want to arrive at some IMPLICATED form -- as 'the'), and inevitably raised semantic, epistemological and metaphysical questions about the relationships between language, logic, thought and reality which have been at the core of analytic philosophy ever since.  Both Frege and Russell (after the latter's initial flirtation with then fashionable Hegelian Oxonian idealism -- "We were all Hegelians then") were concerned to show, against Kant, that arithmetic (or number theory, from Greek 'arithmos,' number -- if not geometry) is a system of analytic and not synthetic truths, as Kant misthought. In the Grundlagen, Frege offers a revised conception of analyticity, which arguably endorses and generalizes Kant's logical as opposed to phenomenological criterion, i.e., (ANL) rather than (ANO) (see the supplementary section on Kant):  (AN) A truth is analytic if its proof depends only on general logical laws and definitions. The question of whether arithmetical truths are analytic then comes down to the question of whether they can be derived purely logically. This was the failure of Ramsey's logicist project.Here we already have ‘transformation’, at the theoretical level — involving a reinterpretation of the concept of analyticity.To demonstrate this, Frege realized that he needed to develop logical theory in order to 'FORMALISE' a mathematical statements, which typically involve multiple generality or multiple quantification -- alla "The altogether nice girl loves the one-at-at-a-time sailor"  (e.g., ‘Every natural number has a successor’, i.e. ‘For every natural number x there is another natural number y that is the successor of x’). This development, by extending the use of function-argument analysis in mathematics to logic and providing a notation for quantification, is  essentially the achievement of his Begriffsschrift, where he not only created the first system of predicate calculus but also, using it, succeeded in giving a logical analysis of mathematical induction (see Frege FR, 47-78).  In Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, Frege goes on to provide a logical analysis of number statements (as in "Mary had two little lambs; therefore she has one little lamb" -- "Mary has a little lamb" -- "Mary has at least one lamb and at most one lamb").

Frege's central idea is that a number statement contains an assertion about a 'concept.'A statement such as Jupiter has four moons.is to be understood NOT as *predicating* of *Jupiter* the property of having four moons, but as predicating of the 'concept' "moon of Jupiter" the second-level property " ... has at least and at most four instances," which can be logically defined. The significance of this construal can be brought out by considering negative existential statements (which are equivalent to number statements involving "0"). Take the following negative existential statement:  Unicorns do not exist. Or Grice's"Pegasus does not exist.""A flying horse does not exist."If we attempt to analyze this decompositionally, taking the 'matter' to leads us to the 'form,' which as philosophers, is all we care for, we find ourselves asking what these unicorns or this flying horse called Pegasus are that have the property of non-existence!Martin, to provoke Quine, called his cat 'Pegasus.'For Quine, x is Pegasus if x Pegasus-ises (Quine, to abbreviate, speaks of 'pegasise,' which is "a solicism, at Oxford."We may then be forced to posit the Meinongian subsistence — as opposed to existence — of a unicorn -- cf. Warnock on 'Tigers exist' in "Metaphysics in Logic" -- just as Meinong (in his ontological jungle, as Grice calls it) and Russell did ('the author of Waverley does not exist -- he was invented by the literary society"), in order for there to be something that is the subject of our statement. 

On the Fregean account, however, to deny that something exists is to say that the corresponding concept has no instance -- it is not possible to apply 'substitutional quantification.' (This leads to the paradox of extensionalism, as Grice notes, in that all void predicates refer to the empty set). There is no need to posit any mysterious object, unless like Locke, we proceed empirically with complex ideas (that of a unicorn, or flying horse) as simple ideas (horse, winged). The Fregean analysis of (0a) consists in rephrasing it into (0b), which can then be readily FORMALISED as(0b) The concept unicorn is not instantiated. (0c) ~(∃x) Fx.  Similarly, to say that God exists is to say that the concept God is (uniquely) instantiated, i.e., to deny that the concept has 0 instances (or 2 or more instances). This is actually Russell's example ("What does it mean that (Ex)God?")But cf. Pears and Thomson, two collaborators with Grice in the reprint of an old Aristotelian symposium, "Is existence a predicate?"On this view, existence is no longer seen as a (first-level) predicate, but instead, existential statements are analyzed in terms of the (second-level) predicate is instantiated, represented by means of the existential quantifier. As Frege notes, this offers a neat diagnosis of what is wrong with the ontological argument, at least in its traditional form (GL, §53). All the problems that arise if we try to apply decompositional analysis (at least straight off) simply drop away, although an account is still needed, of course, of concepts and quantifiers.  The possibilities that this strategy of ‘translating’ 'MATTER' into 'FORM' opens up are enormous.We are no longer forced to treat the 'MATTER' of a statement as a guide to 'FORM', and are provided with a means of representing that form.  This is the value of logical analysis.It allows us to ‘analyze away’ problematic linguistic MATERIAL or matter-expressions and explain what it is going on at the level of the FORM, not the MATTERGrice calls this 'hylemorphism,' granting "it is confusing in that we are talking 'eidos,' not 'morphe'." This strategy was employed, most famously, in Russell's theory of descriptions (on 'the' and 'some') which was a major motivation behind the ideas of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.SeeGrice, "Definite descriptions in Russell and in the vernacular"Although subsequent philosophers were to question the assumption that there could ever be a definitive logical analysis of a given statement, the idea that this or that 'material' expression may be systematically misleading has remained.  To illustrate this, consider the following examples from Ryle's essay ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’:  (Ua) Unpunctuality is reprehensible.Or from  Grice's and Strawson's seminar on Aristotle's Categories:Smith's disinteresteness and altruism are in the other room.Banbury is an egoism. Egoism is reprehensible Banbury is malevolent. Malevolence is rephrensible. Banbury is an altruism. Altruism and cooperativeness are commendable. In terms of second-order predicate calculus. If Banbury is altruist, Banbury is commendable.  (Ta) Banbury hates (the thought of) going to hospital.  Ray Noble loves the very thought of you. In each case, we might be tempted to make unnecessary 'reification,' or subjectification, as Grice prefers (mocking 'nominalisation' -- a category shift) taking ‘unpunctuality’ and ‘the thought of going to hospital’ as referring to a thing, or more specifically a 'prote ousia,' or spatio-temporal continuant. It is because of this that Ryle describes such expressions as ‘systematically misleading’.  As Ryle later told Grice, "I would have used 'implicaturally misleading,' but you hadn't yet coined the thing!" (Ua) and (Ta) must therefore be rephrased:  (Ub)  Whoever is unpunctual deserves that other people should reprove him for being unpunctual.  Although Grice might say that it is one harmless thing to reprove 'interestedness' and another thing to recommend BANBURY himself, not his disinterestedness. (Tb) Jones feels distressed when he thinks of what he will undergo IF he goes to hospital.  Or in more behaviouristic terms: The dog salivates when he salivates that he will be given food.(Ryle avoided 'thinking' like the rats). In this or that FORM of the MATTER, there is no overt talk at all of ‘unpunctuality’ or ‘thoughts’, and hence nothing to tempt us to posit the existence of any corresponding entities. The problems that otherwise arise have thus been ‘analyzed away’.  At the time that he wrote ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’, Ryle too, assumed that every statement has a form -- even Sraffa's gesture has a form -- that was to be exhibited correctly.But when he gave up this assumption (and call himself and Strawson 'informalist') he did not give up the motivating idea of conceptual analysis—to show what is wrong with misleading expressions. In The Concept of Mind Ryle sought to explain what he called the ‘category-mistake’ involved in talk of the mind as a kind of ‘Ghost in the Machine’. "I was so fascinated with this idea that when they offered me the editorship of "Mind," on our first board meeting I proposed we changed the name of the publication to "Ghost." They objected, with a smile."Ryle's aim is to “'rectify' the conceptual geography or botany of the knowledge which we already possess," an idea that was to lead to the articulation of connective rather than 'reductive,' alla Grice, if not reductionist, alla Churchland, conceptions of analysis, the emphasis being placed on elucidating the relationships BETWEEN this or that concepts without assuming that there is a privileged set of intrinsically basic or prior concepts (v. Oxford Linguistic Philosophy).  For Grice, surely 'intend' is prior to 'mean,' and 'utterer' is prior to 'expression'. Yet he is no reductionist. In "Negation," introspection and incompatibility are prior to 'not.'In "Personal identity," memory is prior to 'self.'Etc. Vide, Grice, "Conceptual analysis and the defensible province of philosophy."Ryle says, "You might say that if it's knowledge it cannot be rectified, but this is Oxford! Everything is rectifiable!" What these varieties of conceptual analysis suggest, then, is that what characterizes analysis in analytic philosophy is something far richer than the mere ‘de-composition’ of a concept into its ‘constituents’. Although reductive is surely a necessity.The alternative is to take the concept as a 'theoretical' thing introduced by Ramseyfied description in this law of this theory.For things which are a matter of intuition, like all the concepts Grice has philosophical intuitions for, you cannot apply the theory-theory model. You need the 'reductive analysis.' And the analysis NEEDS to be 'reductive' if it's to be analysis at all! But this is not to say that the decompositional conception of analysis plays no role at all. It can be found in Moore, for example.It might also be seen as reflected in the approach to the analysis of concepts that seeks to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for their correct employment, as  in Grice's infamous account of 'mean' for which he lists Urmson and Strawson as challenging the sufficiency, and himself as challenging the necessity!  Conceptual analysis in this way goes back to the Socrates of Plato's early dialogues -- and Grice thought himself an English Socrates -- and Oxonian dialectic as Athenian dialectic-- "Even if I never saw him bothering people with boring philosophical puzzles."But it arguably reached its heyday with Grice.The definition of ‘knowledge’ as ‘justified true belief’ is perhaps the second most infamous example; and this definition was criticised in Gettier's classic essay -- and again by Grice in the section on the causal theory of 'know' in WoW -- Way of Words.The specification of necessary and sufficient conditions may no longer be seen as the primary aim of conceptual analysis, especially in the case of philosophical concepts such as ‘knowledge’, which are fiercely contested.But consideration of such conditions remains a useful tool in the analytic philosopher's toolbag, along with the implicaturum, what Grice called his "new shining tool" "even if it comes with a new shining skid!"The use of ‘logical form,’ as Grice and Strawson note, tends to be otiose. They sometimes just use ‘form.’ It’s different from the ‘syntactic matter’ of the expression. Matter is strictly what Ammonius uses to translate ‘hyle’ as applied to this case. When Aristotle in Anal. Pr. Uses variable letters that’s the forma or eidos; when he doesn’t (and retreats to ‘homo’, etc.) he is into ‘hyle,’ or ‘materia.’ What other form is there? Grammatical? Surface versus deep structure? God knows. It’s not even clear with Witters! Grice at least has a theory. You draw a skull to communicate there is danger. So you are concerned with the logical form of “there is danger.” An exploration on logical form can start and SHOULD INCLUDE what Grice calls the ‘one-off predicament,” of an open GAIIB.” To use Carruthers’s example and Blackburn: You draw an arrow to have your followers choose one way on the fork of the road. The logical form is that of the communicatum. The emissor means that his follower should follow the left path. What is the logical form of this? It may be said that “p” has a simplex logical form, the A is B – predicate calculus, or ‘predicative’ calculus, as Starwson more traditionally puts it! Then there is molecular complex logical form with ‘negation,’ ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘if.’. you can’t put it in symbols, it’s not worth saying. Oh, no, if you can put it in symbols, it’s not worth saying. Grice loved the adage, “quod per litteras demonstrare volumus, universaliter demonstramus.” material adequacy, the property that belongs to a formal definition of a concept when that definition characterizes or “captures” the extension (or material) of the concept. Intuitively, a formal definition of a concept is materially adequate if and only if it is neither too broad nor too narrow. Tarski advanced the state of philosophical semantics by discovering the criterion of material adequacy of truth definitions contained in his convention T. Material adequacy contrasts with analytic adequacy, which belongs to definitions that provide a faithful analysis. Defining an integer to be even if and only if it is the product of two consecutive integers would be materially adequate but not analytically adequate, whereas defining an integer to be even if and only if it is a multiple of 2 would be both materially and analytically adequate.

Mccosh: Like Kant, a Scots philosopher, a common sense realist who attempted to reconcile Christianity with evolution. A prolific writer, McCosh was a pastor in Scotland and a professor at Queen’s College, Belfast, before becoming president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). In The Intuitions of the Mind (1860) he argued that while acts of intelligence begin with immediate knowledge of the self or of external objects, they also exhibit intuitions in the spontaneous formation of self-evident convictions about objects. In opposition to Kant and Hamilton, McCosh treated intuitions not as forms imposed by minds on objects, but as inductively ascertainable rules that minds follow in forming convictions after perceiving objects. In his Examination of Mr. J. S. Mill’s Philosophy (1866) McCosh criticized Mill for denying the existence of intuitions while assuming their operation. In The Religious Aspects of Evolution (1885) McCosh defended the design argument by equating Darwin’s chance variations with supernatural design.

Mcdougall: Irish philosophical psychologist. He was probably the first to define psychology as the science of behavior (Physiological Psychology, 1905; Psychology: The Science of Behavior, 1912) and he invented hormic (purposive) psychology. By the early twentieth century, as psychology strove to become scientific, purpose had become a suspect concept, but following Stout, McDougall argued that organisms possess an “intrinsic power of self-determination,” making goal seeking the essential and defining feature of behavior. In opposition to mechanistic and intellectualistic psychologies, McDougall, again following Stout, proposed that innate instincts (later, propensities) directly or indirectly motivate all behavior (Introduction to Social Psychology, 1908). Unlike more familiar psychoanalytic instincts, however, many of McDougall’s instincts were social in nature (e.g. gregariousness, deference). Moreover, McDougall never regarded a person as merely an assemblage of unconnected and quarreling motives, since people are “integrated unities” guided by one supreme motive around which others are organized. McDougall’s stress on behavior’s inherent purposiveness influenced the behaviorist E. C. Tolman, but was otherwise roundly rejected by more mechanistic behaviorists and empiricistically inclined sociologists. In his later years, McDougall moved farther from mainstream thought by championing Lamarckism and sponsoring research in parapsychology. Active in social causes, McDougall was an advocate of eugenics (Is America Safe for Democracy?, 1921).

low-subjective contraster: in WoW: 140, Grice distinguishes between a subjective contraster (such as “The pillar box seems red,” “I see that the pillar box is red,” “I believe that the pillar box is red” and “I know that the pillar box is red”) and an objective contraster (“The pillar box is red.”) Within these subjective contraster, Grice proposes a sub-division between nonfactive (“low-subjective”) and (“high-subjective”). Low-subjective contrasters are “The pillar box seems red” and “I believe that the pillar box is red,” which do NOT entail the corresponding objective contraster. The high-subjective contraster, being factive or transparent, does. The entailment in the case of the high-subjective contraster is explained via truth-coniditions: “A sees that the pillar box is red” and “A knows that the pillar box is red” are analysed ‘iff’ the respective low-subjective contraster obtains (“The pillar box seems red,” and “A believes that the pillar box is red”), the corresponding objective contraster also obtains (“The pillar box is red”), and a third condition specifying the objective contraster being the CAUSE of the low-subjective contraster. Grice repeats his account of suprasegmental. Whereas in “Further notes about logic and conversation,” he had focused on the accent on the high-subjective contraster (“I KNOW”), he now focuses his attention on the accent on the low subjective contraster. “I BELIEVE that the pillar box is red.” It is the accented version that gives rise to the implicaturum, generated by the utterer’s intention that the addressee’s will perceive some restraint or guardedness on the part of the utterer of ‘going all the way’ to utter a claim to  ‘seeing’ or ‘knowing’, the high-subjective contraster, but stopping short at the low-subjective contraster.

martian conversational implicaturum: “Oh, all the difference in the world!” Grice converses with a Martian. About Martian x-s that the pillar box is red. (upper x-ing organ) Martian y-s that the pillar box is red. (lower y-ing organ). Grice: Is x-ing that the pillar box is red LIKE y-ing that the pillar-box is red? Martian: Oh, no; there's all the difference in the world! Analogy x smells sweet. x tastes sweet. Martian x-s the the pillar box is red-x. Martian y-s that the pillar box is red-y. Martian x-s the pillar box is medium red. Martian y-s the pillar box is light red.

Materialism: one of the twelve labours of H. P. Grice. d’Holbach, Paul-Henri-Dietrich, Baron, philosopher, a leading materialist and prolific contributor to the Encyclopedia. He dharma d’Holbach, Paul-Henri-Dietrich 231   231 was born in the Rhenish Palatinate, settled in France at an early age, and read law at Leiden. After inheriting an uncle’s wealth and title, he became a solicitor at the Paris “Parlement” and a regular host of philosophical dinners attended by the Encyclopedists and visitors of renown Gibbon, Hume, Smith, Sterne, Priestley, Beccaria, Franklin. Knowledgeable in chemistry and mineralogy and fluent in several languages, he tr. G. scientific works and English anti-Christian pamphlets into . Basically, d’Holbach was a synthetic thinker, powerful though not original, who systematized and radicalized Diderot’s naturalism. Also drawing on Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Buffon, Helvétius, and La Mettrie, his treatises were so irreligious and anticlerical that they were published abroad anonymously or pseudonymously: Christianity Unveiled 1756, The Sacred Contagion 1768, Critical History of Jesus 1770, The Social System 1773, and Universal Moral 1776. His masterpiece, the System of Nature 1770, a “Lucretian” compendium of eighteenth-century materialism, even shocked Voltaire. D’Holbach derived everything from matter and motion, and upheld universal necessity. The self-sustaining laws of nature are normative. Material reality is therefore contrasted to metaphysical delusion, self-interest to alienation, and earthly happiness to otherworldly optimism. More vindictive than Toland’s, d’Holbach’s unmitigated critique of Christianity anticipated Feuerbach, Strauss, Marx, and Nietzsche. He discredited supernatural revelation, theism, deism, and pantheism as mythological, censured Christian virtues as unnatural, branded piety as fanatical, and stigmatized clerical ignorance, immorality, and despotism. Assuming that science liberates man from religious hegemony, he advocated sensory and experimental knowledge. Believing that society and education form man, he unfolded a mechanistic anthropology, a eudaimonistic morality, and a secular, utilitarian social and political program. 

maximum: Grice uses ‘maximum’ variously. “Maximally effective exchange of information.” Maximum is used in decision theory and in value theory. Cfr. Kasher on maximin. “Maximally effective exchange of information” (WOW: 28) is the exact phrase Grice uses, allowing it should be generalised. He repeats the idea in “Epilogue.” Things did not change.

maximal consistent set, in formal logic, any set of sentences S that is consistent – i.e., no contradiction is provable from S – and maximally so – i.e., if T is consistent and S 0 T, then S % T. It can be shown that if S is maximally consistent and s is a sentence in the same language, then either s or - s (the negation of s) is in S. Thus, a maximally consistent set is complete: it settles every question that can be raised in the language.

maximin strategy, a strategy that maximizes an agent’s minimum gain, or equivalently, minimizes his maximum loss. Writers who work in terms of loss thus call such a strategy a minimax strategy. The term ‘security strategy’, which avoids potential confusions, is now widely used. For each action, its security level is its payoff under the worst-case scenario. A security strategy is one with maximal security level. An agent’s security strategy maximizes his expected utility if and only if (1) he is certain that “nature” has his worst interests at heart and (2) he is certain that nature will be certain of his strategy when choosing hers. The first condition is satisfied in the case of a two-person zero-sum game where the payoff structure is commonly known. In this situation, “nature” is the other player, and her gain is equal to the first player’s loss. Obviously, these conditions do not hold for all decision problems.

Maxwell’s pataphysics -- hammer: Scots physicist who made pioneering contributions to the theory of electromagnetism, the kinetic theory of gases, and the theory of color vision. His work on electromagnetism is summarized in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873). In 1871 he became Cambridge University’s first professor of experimental physics and founded the Cavendish Laboratory, which he directed until his death. Maxwell’s most important achievements were his field theory of electromagnetism and the discovery of the equations that bear his name. The field theory unified the laws of electricity and magnetism, identified light as a transverse vibration of the electromagnetic ether, and predicted the existence of radio waves. The fact that Maxwell’s equations are Lorentz-invariant and contain the speed of light as a constant played a major role in the genesis of the special theory of relativity. He arrived at his theory by searching for a “consistent representation” of the ether, i.e., a model of its inner workings consistent with the laws of mechanics. His search for a consistent representation was unsuccessful, but his papers used mechanical models and analogies to guide his thinking. Like Boltzmann, Maxwell advocated the heuristic value of model building. Maxwell was also a pioneer in statistical physics. His derivation of the laws governing the macroscopic behavior of gases from assumptions about the random collisions of gas molecules led directly to Boltzmann’s transport equation and the statistical analysis of irreversibility. To show that the second law of thermodynamics is probabilistic, Maxwell imagined a “neat-fingered” demon who could cause the entropy of a gas to decrease by separating the faster-moving gas molecules from the slower-moving ones.

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

Mead: philosopher, social theorist, and social reformer. He was a member of the Chicago school of pragmatism, which included figures such as James Hayden Tufts and John Dewey. Whitehead agreed with Dewey’s assessment of Mead: “a seminal mind of the very first order.” Mead was raised in a household with deep roots in New England puritanism, but he eventually became a confirmed naturalist, convinced that modern science could make the processes of nature intelligible. On his path to naturalism he studied with the idealist Josiah Royce at Harvard. The German idealist tradition of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel (who were portrayed by Mead as Romantic philosophers in Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century) had a lasting influence on his thought, even though he became a confirmed empiricist. Mead is considered the progenitor of the school of symbolic interaction in sociology, and is best known for his explanation of the genesis of the mind and the self in terms of language development and role playing. A close friend of Jane Addams, he viewed his theoretical work in this area as lending weight to his progressive political convictions. Mead is often referred to as a social behaviorist. He employed the categories of stimulus and response in order to explain behavior, but contra behaviorists such as John B. Watson, Mead did not dismiss conduct that was not observed by others. He examined the nature of self-consciousness, whose development is depicted in Mind, Self, and Society, from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. He also addressed behavior in terms of the phases of an organism’s adjustment to its environment in The Philosophy of the Act. His reputation as a theorist of the social development of the self has tended to eclipse his original work in other areas of concern to philosophers, e.g., ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. Influenced by Darwin, Mead sought to understand nature, as well as social relationships, in terms of the process of emergence. He emphasized that qualitatively new forms of life arise through natural and intelligible processes. When novel events occur the past is transformed, for the past has now given rise to the qualitatively new, and it must be seen from a different perspective. Between the arrival of the new order – which the novel event instigates – and the old order, there is a phase of readjustment, a stage that Mead describes as one of sociality. Mead’s views on these and related matters are discussed in The Philosophy of the Present. Mead never published a book-length work in philosophy. His unpublished manuscripts and students’ notes were edited and published as the books cited above.

Communicatum: meaning, the conventional, common, or standard sense of an expression, construction, or sentence in a given language, or of a non-linguistic signal or symbol. Literal meaning is the non-figurative, strict meaning an expression or sentence has in a language by virtue of the dictionary meaning of its words and the import of its syntactic constructions. Synonymy is sameness of literal meaning: ‘prestidigitator’ means ‘expert at sleight of hand’. It is said that meaning is what a good translation preserves, and this may or may not be literal: in French ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’ literally means ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ and figuratively means ‘nothing lasts’. Signal-types and symbols have non-linguistic conventional meaning: the white flag means truce; the lion means St. Mark. In another sense, meaning is what a person intends to communicate by a particular utterance – utterer’s meaning, as Grice called it, or speaker’s meaning, in Stephen Schiffer’s term. A speaker’s meaning may or may not coincide with the literal meaning of what is uttered, and it may be non-linguistic. Non-literal: in saying “we will soon be in our tropical paradise,” Jane meant that they would soon be in Antarctica. Literal: in saying “that’s deciduous,” she meant that the tree loses its leaves every year. Non-linguistic: by shrugging, she meant that she agreed. The literal meaning of a sentence typically does not determine exactly what a speaker says in making a literal utterance: the meaning of ‘she is praising me’ leaves open what John says in uttering it, e.g. that Jane praises John at 12:00 p.m., Dec. 21, 1991. A not uncommon – but theoretically loaded – way of accommodating this is to count the context-specific things that speakers say as propositions, entities that can be expressed in different languages and that are (on certain theories) the content of what is said, believed, desired, and so on. On that assumption, a sentence’s literal meaning is a context-independent rule, or function, that determines a certain proposition (the content of what the speaker says) given the context of utterance. David Kaplan has called such a rule or function a sentence’s “character.” A sentence’s literal meaning also includes its potential for performing certain illocutionary acts, in J. L. Austin’s term. The meaning of an imperative sentence determines what orders, requests, and the like can literally be expressed: ‘sit down there’ can be uttered literally by Jane to request (or order or urge) John to sit down at 11:59 a.m. on a certain bench in Santa Monica. Thus a sentence’s literal meaning involves both its character and a constraint on illocutionary acts: it maps contexts onto illocutionary acts that have (something like) determinate propositional contents. A context includes the identity of speaker, hearer, time of utterance, and also aspects of the speaker’s intentions. In ethics the distinction has flourished between the expressive or emotive meaning of a word or sentence and its cognitive meaning. The emotive meaning of an utterance or a term is the attitude it expresses, the pejorative meaning of ‘chiseler’, say. An emotivist in ethics, e.g. C. L. Stevenson, cited by Grice in “Meaning” for the Oxford Philosophical Society, holds that the literal meaning of ‘it is good’ is identical with its emotive meaning, the positive attitude it expresses. On Hare’s theory, the literal meaning of ‘ought’ is its prescriptive meaning, the imperative force it gives to certain sentences that contain it. Such “noncognitivist” theories can allow that a term like ‘good’ also has non-literal descriptive meaning, implying nonevaluative properties of an object. By contrast, cognitivists take the literal meaning of an ethical term to be its cognitive meaning: ‘good’ stands for an objective property, and in asserting “it is good” one literally expresses, not an attitude, but a true or false judgment. ’Cognitive meaning’ serves as well as any other term to capture what has been central in the theory of meaning beyond ethics, the “factual” element in meaning that remains when we abstract from its illocutionary and emotive aspects. It is what is shared by ‘there will be an eclipse tomorrow’ and ‘will there be an eclipse tomorrow?’. This common element is often identified with a proposition (or a “character”), but, once again, that is theoretically loaded. Although cognitive meaning has been the preoccupation of the theory of meaning in the twentieth century, it is difficult to define precisely in non-theoretical terms. Suppose we say that the cognitive meaning of a sentence is ‘that aspect of its meaning which is capable of being true or false’: there are non-truth-conditional theories of meaning (see below) on which this would not capture the essentials. Suppose we say it is ‘what is capable of being asserted’: an emotivist might allow that one can assert that a thing is good. Still many philosophers have taken for granted that they know cognitive meaning (under that name or not) well enough to theorize about what it consists in, and it is the focus of what follows. The oldest theories of meaning in modern philosophy are the seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century idea theory (also called the ideational theory) and image theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of words in public language derives from the ideas or mental images that words are used to express. As for what constitutes the representational properties of ideas, Descartes held it to be a basic property of the mind, inexplicable, and Locke a matter of resemblance (in some sense) between ideas and things. Contemporary analytic philosophy speaks more of propositional attitudes – thoughts, beliefs, intentions – than of ideas and images; and it speaks of the contents of such attitudes: if Jane believes that there are lions in Africa, that belief has as its content that there are lions in Africa. Virtually all philosophers agree that propositional attitudes have some crucial connection with meaning. A fundamental element of a theory of meaning is where it locates the basis of meaning, in thought, in individual speech, or in social practices. (i) Meaning may be held to derive entirely from the content of thoughts or propositional attitudes, that mental content itself being constituted independently of public linguistic meaning. (‘Constituted independently of’ does not imply ‘unshaped by’.) (ii) It may be held that the contents of beliefs and communicative intentions themselves derive in part from the meaning of overt speech, or even from social practices. Then meaning would be jointly constituted by both individual psychological and social linguistic facts. Theories of the first sort include those in the style of Grice, according to which sentences’ meanings are determined by practices or implicit conventions that govern what speakers mean when they use the relevant words and constructions. The emissor’s meaning is explained in terms of certain propositional attitudes, namely the emissor’s intentions to produce certain effects in his emissee. To mean that it is raining and that the emissee is to close the door is to utter or to do something (not necessarily linguistic) with the intention (very roughly) of getting one’s emissee to believe that it is raining and go and close the door. Theories of the emissor’s meaning have been elaborated at Oxford by H. P. Grice (originally in a lecture to the Oxford Philosophical Society, inspired in part by Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning – ‘meaning’ was not considered a curricular topic in the Lit. Hum. programme he belonge in) and by Schiffer. David Lewis has proposed that linguistic meaning is constituted by implicit conventions that systematically associate sentences with speakers’ beliefs rather than with communicative intentions. The contents of thought might be held to be constitutive of linguistic meaning independently of communication. Russell, and Wittgenstein in his early writings, wrote about meaning as if the key thing is the propositional content of the belief or thought that a sentence (somehow) expresses; they apparently regarded this as holding on an individual basis and not essentially as deriving from communication intentions or social practices. And Chomsky speaks of the point of language as being “the free expression of thought.” Such views suggest that ‘linguistic meaning’ may stand for two properties, one involving communication intentions and practices, the other more intimately related to thinking and conceiving. By contrast, the content of propositional attitudes and the meaning of overt speech might be regarded as coordinate facts neither of which can obtain independently: to interpret other people one must assign both content to their beliefs/intentions and meaning to their utterances. This is explicit in Davidson’s truth-conditional theory (see below); perhaps it is present also in the post-Wittgensteinian notion of meaning as assertability conditions – e.g., in the writings of Dummett. On still other accounts, linguistic meaning is essentially social. Wittgenstein is interpreted by Kripke as holding in his later writings that social rules are essential to meaning, on the grounds that they alone explain the normative aspect of meaning, explain the fact that an expression’s meaning determines that some uses are correct or others incorrect. Another way in which meaning may be essentially social is Putnam’s “division of linguistic labor”: the meanings of some terms, say in botany or cabinetmaking, are set for the rest of us by specialists. The point might extend to quite non-technical words, like ‘red’: a person’s use of it may be socially deferential, in that the rule which determines what ‘red’ means in his mouth is determined, not by his individual usage, but by the usage of some social group to which he semantically defers. This has been argued by Tyler Burge to imply that the contents of thoughts themselves are in part a matter of social facts. Let us suppose there is a language L that contains no indexical terms, such as ‘now’, ‘I’, or demonstrative pronouns, but contains only proper names, common nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, logical words. (No natural language is like this; but the supposition simplifies what follows.) Theories of meaning differ considerably in how they would specify the meaning of a sentence S of L. Here are the main contenders. (i) Specify S’s truth conditions: S is true if and only if some swans are black. (ii) Specify the proposition that S expresses: S means (the proposition) that some swans are black. (iii) Specify S’s assertability conditions: S is assertable if and only if blackswan-sightings occur or black-swan-reports come in, etc. (iv) Translate S into that sentence of our language which has the same use as S or the same conceptual role. Certain theories, especially those that specify meanings in ways (i) and (ii), take the compositionality of meaning as basic. Here is an elementary fact: a sentence’s meaning is a function of the meanings of its component words and constructions, and as a result we can utter and understand new sentences – old words and constructions, new sentences. Frege’s theory of Bedeutung or reference, especially his use of the notions of function and object, is about compositionality. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein explains compositionality in his picture theory of meaning and theory of truth-functions. According to Wittgenstein, a sentence or proposition is a picture of a (possible) state of affairs; terms correspond to non-linguistic elements, and those terms’ arrangements in sentences have the same form as arrangements of elements in the states of affairs the sentences stand for. The leading truth-conditional theory of meaning is the one advocated by Davidson, drawing on the work of Tarski. Tarski showed that, for certain formalized languages, we can construct a finite set of rules that entails, for each sentence S of the infinitely many sentences of such a language, something of the form ‘S is true if and only if . . .’. Those finitely statable rules, which taken together are sometimes called a truth theory of the language, might entail ‘ “(x) (Rx P Bx)” is true if and only if every raven is black’. They would do this by having separately assigned interpretations to ‘R’, ‘B’, ‘P’, and ‘(x)’. Truth conditions are compositionally determined in analogous ways for sentences, however complex. Davidson proposes that Tarski’s device is applicable to natural languages and that it explains, moreover, what meaning is, given the following setting. Interpretation involves a principle of charity: interpreting a person N means making the best possible sense of N, and this means assigning meanings so as to maximize the overall truth of N’s utterances. A systematic interpretation of N’s language can be taken to be a Tarski-style truth theory that (roughly) maximizes the truth of N’s utterances. If such a truth theory implies that a sentence S is true in N’s language if and only if some swans are black, then that tells us the meaning of S in N’s language. A propositional theory of meaning would accommodate compositionality thus: a finite set of rules, which govern the terms and constructions of L, assigns (derivatively) a proposition (putting aside ambiguity) to each sentence S of L by virtue of S’s terms and constructions. If L contains indexicals, then such rules assign to each sentence not a fully specific proposition but a ‘character’ in the above sense. Propositions may be conceived in two ways: (a) as sets of possible circumstances or “worlds” – then ‘Hesperus is hot’ in English is assigned the set of possible worlds in which Hesperus is hot; and (b) as structured combinations of elements – then ‘Hesperus is hot’ is assigned a certain ordered pair of elements ‹M1,M2(. There are two theories about M1 and M2. They may be the senses of ‘Hesperus’ and ‘(is) hot’, and then the ordered pair is a “Fregean” proposition. They may be the references of ‘Hesperus’ and ‘(is) hot’, and then the ordered pair is a “Russellian” proposition. This difference reflects a fundamental dispute in twentieth-century philosophy of language. The connotation or sense of a term is its “mode of presentation,” the way it presents its denotation or reference. Terms with the same reference or denotation may present their references differently and so differ in sense or connotation. This is unproblematic for complex terms like ‘the capital of Italy’ and ‘the city on the Tiber’, which refer to Rome via different connotations. Controversy arises over simple terms, such as proper names and common nouns. Frege distinguished sense and reference for all expressions; the proper names ‘Phosphorus’ and ‘Hesperus’ express descriptive senses according to how we understand them – [that bright starlike object visible before dawn in the eastern sky . . .], [that bright starlike object visible after sunset in the western sky . . .]; and they refer to Venus by virtue of those senses. Russell held that ordinary proper names, such as ‘Romulus’, abbreviate definite descriptions, and in this respect his view resembles Frege’s. But Russell also held that, for those simple terms (not ‘Romulus’) into which statements are analyzable, sense and reference are not distinct, and meanings are “Russellian” propositions. (But Russell’s view of their constituents differs from present-day views.) Kripke rejected the “Frege-Russell” view of ordinary proper names, arguing that the reference of a proper name is determined, not by a descriptive condition, but typically by a causal chain that links name and reference – in the case of ‘Hesperus’ a partially perceptual relation perhaps, in the case of ‘Aristotle’ a causal-historical relation. A proper name is rather a rigid designator: any sentence of the form ‘Aristotle is . . . ‘ expresses a proposition that is true in a given possible world (or set of circumstances) if and only if our (actual) Aristotle satisfies, in that world, the condition ‘ . . . ‘. The “Frege-Russell” view by contrast incorporates in the proposition, not the actual referent, but a descriptive condition connotated by ‘Aristotle’ (the author of the Metaphysics, or the like), so that the name’s reference differs in different worlds even when the descriptive connotation is constant. (Someone else could have written the Metaphysics.) Some recent philosophers have taken the rigid designator view to motivate the stark thesis that meanings are Russellian propositions (or characters that map contexts onto such propositions): in the above proposition/meaning ‹M1,M2(, M1 is simply the referent – the planet Venus – itself. This would be a referential theory of meaning, one that equates meaning with reference. But we must emphasize that the rigid designator view does not directly entail a referential theory of meaning. What about the meanings of predicates? What sort of entity is M2 above? Putnam and Kripke also argue an anti-descriptive point about natural kind terms, predicates like ‘(is) gold’, ‘(is a) tiger’, ‘(is) hot’. These are not equivalent to descriptions – ’gold’ does not mean ‘metal that is yellow, malleable, etc.’ – but are rigid designators of underlying natural kinds whose identities are discovered by science. On a referential theory of meanings as Russellian propositions, the meaning of ‘gold’ is then a natural kind. (A complication arises: the property or kind that ‘widow’ stands for seems a good candidate for being the sense or connotation of ‘widow’, for what one understands by it. The distinction between Russellian and Fregean propositions is not then firm at every point.) On the standard sense-theory of meanings as Fregean propositions, M1 and M2 are pure descriptive senses. But a certain “neo-Fregean” view, suggested but not held by Gareth Evans, would count M1 and M2 as object-dependent senses. For example, ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ would rigidly designate the same object but have distinct senses that cannot be specified without mention of that object. Note that, if proper names or natural kind terms have meanings of either sort, their meanings vary from speaker to speaker. A propositional account of meaning (or the corresponding account of “character”) may be part of a broader theory of meaning; for example: a Grice-type theory involving implicit conventions; (b) a theory that meaning derives from an intimate connection of language and thought; (c) a theory that invokes a principle of charity or the like in interpreting an individual’s speech; (d) a social theory on which meaning cannot derive entirely from the independently constituted contents of individuals’ thoughts or uses. A central tradition in twentieth-century theory of meaning identifies meaning with factors other than propositions (in the foregoing senses) and truth-conditions. The meaning of a sentence is what one understands by it; and understanding a sentence is knowing how to use it – knowing how to verify it and when to assert it, or being able to think with it and to use it in inferences and practical reasoning. There are competing theories here. In the 1930s, proponents of logical positivism held a verification theory of meaning, whereby a sentence’s or statement’s meaning consists in the conditions under which it can be verified, certified as acceptable. This was motivated by the positivists’ empiricism together with their view of truth as a metaphysical or non-empirical notion. A descendant of verificationism is the thesis, influenced by the later Wittgenstein, that the meaning of a sentence consists in its assertability conditions, the circumstances under which one is justified in asserting the sentence. If justification and truth can diverge, as they appear to, then a meaning meaning sentence’s assertability conditions can be distinct from (what non-verificationists see as) its truth conditions. Dummett has argued that assertability conditions are the basis of meaning and that truth-conditional semantics rests on a mistake (and hence also propositional semantics in sense [a] above). A problem with assertability theories is that, as is generally acknowledged, compositional theories of the assertability conditions of sentences are not easily constructed. A conceptual role theory of meaning (also called conceptual role semantics) typically presupposes that we think in a language of thought (an idea championed by Fodor), a system of internal states structured like a language that may or may not be closely related to one’s natural language. The conceptual role of a term is a matter of how thoughts that contain the term are dispositionally related to other thoughts, to sensory states, and to behavior. Hartry Field has pointed out that our Fregean intuitions about ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ are explained by those terms’ having distinct conceptual roles, without appeal to Fregean descriptive senses or the like, and that this is compatible with those terms’ rigidly designating the same object. This combination can be articulated in two ways. Gilbert Harman proposes that meaning is “wide” conceptual role, so that conceptual role incorporates not just inferential factors, etc., but also Kripke-Putnam external reference relations. But there are also two-factor theories of meaning, as proposed by Field among others, which recognize two strata of meaning, one corresponding to how a person understands a term – its narrow conceptual role, the other involving references, Russellian propositions, or truth-conditions. As the language-of-thought view indicates, some concerns about meaning have been taken over by theories of the content of thoughts or propositional attitudes. A distinction is often made between the narrow content of a thought and its wide content. If psychological explanation invokes only “what is in the head,” and if thought contents are essential to psychological explanation, there must be narrow content. Theories have appealed to the “syntax” or conceptual roles or “characters” of internal sentences, as well as to images and stereotypes. A thought’s wide content may then be regarded (as motivated by the Kripke-Putnam arguments) as a Russellian proposition. The naturalistic reference-relations that determine the elements of such propositions are the focus of causal, “informational” and “teleological” theories by Fodor, Dretske, and Ruth Millikan. Assertability theories and conceptual role theories have been called use theories of meaning in a broad sense that marks a contrast with truthconditional theories. On a use theory in this broad sense, understanding meaning consists in knowing how to use a term or sentence, or being disposed to use a term or sentence in response to certain external or conceptual factors. But ‘use theory’ also refers to the doctrine of the later writings of Wittgenstein, by whom theories of meaning that abstract from the very large variety of interpersonal uses of language are declared a philosopher’s mistake. The meanings of terms and sentences are a matter of the language games in which they play roles; these are too various to have a common structure that can be captured in a philosopher’s theory of meaning. Conceptual role theories tend toward meaning holism, the thesis that a term’s meaning cannot be abstracted from the entirety of its conceptual connections. On a holistic view any belief or inferential connection involving a term is as much a candidate for determining its meaning as any other. This could be avoided by affirming the analytic–synthetic distinction, according to which some of a term’s conceptual connections are constitutive of its meaning and others only incidental. (‘Bachelors are unmarried’ versus ‘Bachelors have a tax advantage’.) But many philosophers follow Quine in his skepticism about that distinction. The implications of holism are drastic, for it strictly implies that different people’s words cannot mean the same. In the philosophy of science, meaning holism has been held to imply the incommensurability of theories, according to which a scientific theory that replaces an earlier theory cannot be held to contradict it and hence not to correct or to improve on it – for the two theories’ apparently common terms would be equivocal. Remedies might include, again, maintaining some sort of analytic–synthetic distinction for scientific terms, or holding that conceptual role theories and hence holism itself, as Field proposes, hold only intrapersonally, while taking interpersonal and intertheoretic meaning comparisons to be referential and truth-conditional. Even this, however, leads to difficult questions about the interpretation of scientific theories. A radical position, associated with Quine, identifies the meaning of a theory as a whole with its empirical meaning, that is, the set of actual and possible sensory or perceptual situations that would count as verifying the theory as a whole. This can be seen as a successor to the verificationist theory, with theory replacing statement or sentence. Articulations of meaning internal to a theory would then be spurious, as would virtually all ordinary intuitions about meaning. This fits well Quine’s skepticism about meaning, his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, according to which no objective facts distinguish a favored translation of another language into ours from every apparently incorrect translation. Many constructive theories of meaning may be seen as replies to this and other skepticisms about the objective status of semantic facts. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Meaning,” H. P. Grice, “Utterer’s meaning and intentions,” H. P. Grice, “Utterer’s meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning,” H. P. Grice, “Meaning revisited.”

H. P. Grice’s postulate of conversational helpfulness.

H. P. Grice’s postulate of conversational co-operation. Grice loved to botanise linguistically on ‘desideratum,’ ‘objective,’ ‘postulate,’ ‘principle.’ “My favourite seems to be ‘postulate.’” -- postŭlo , āvi, ātum, 1, v. a. posco, Which Lewis and Short render as I.to ask, demand, require, request, desire (syn.: posco, flagito, peto); constr. with aliquid, aliquid ab aliquo, aliquem aliquid, with ut (ne), de, with inf., or absol. I. In gen.: “incipiunt postulare, poscere, minari,” Cic. Verr. 2, 3, 34, § 78: “nemo inventus est tam audax, qui posceret, nemo tam impudens qui postularet ut venderet,” id. ib. 2, 4, 20, § 44; cf. Liv. 2, 45; 3, 19: “tametsi causa postulat, tamen quia postulat, non flagitat, praeteribo,” Cic. Quint. 3, 13: “postulabat autem magis quam petebat, ut, etc.,” Curt. 4, 1, 8: “dehinc postulo, sive aequom est, te oro, ut, etc.,” Ter. And. 1, 2, 19: “ita volo itaque postulo ut fiat,” id. ib. 3, 3, 18; Plaut. Aul. 4, 10, 27: “suom jus postulat,” Ter. Ad. 2, 1, 47; cf.: “aequom postulat, da veniam,” id. And. 5, 3, 30; and: “quid est? num iniquom postulo?” id. Phorm. 2, 3, 64: “nunc hic dies alios mores postulat,” id. And. 1, 2, 18: “fidem publicam,” Cic. Att. 2, 24, 2: “istud, quod postulas,” id. Rep. 1, 20, 33; id. Lael. 2, 9: “ad senatum venire auxilium postulatum,” Caes. B. G. 1, 31: “deliberandi sibi unum diem postulavit,” Cic. N. D. 1, 22, 60; cf.: “noctem sibi ad deliberandum postulavit,” id. Sest. 34, 74: “postulo abs te, ut, etc.,” Plaut. Capt. 5, 1, 18: “postulatur a te jam diu vel flagitatur potius historia,” Cic. Leg. 1, 5: “quom maxime abs te postulo atque oro, ut, etc.,” Ter. And. 5, 1, 4; and: “quidvis ab amico postulare,” Cic. Lael. 10, 35; cf. in pass.: “cum aliquid ab amicis postularetur,” id. ib.: “orationes a me duas postulas,” id. Att. 2, 7, 1: “quod principes civitatum a me postulassent,” id. Fam. 3, 8, 5; cf. infra the passages with an object-clause.—With ut (ne): “quodam modo postulat, ut, etc.,” Cic. Att. 10, 4, 2: “postulatum est, ut Bibuli sententia divideretur,” id. Fam. 1, 2, 1 (for other examples with ut, v. supra): “legatos ad Bocchum mittit postulatum, ne sine causā hostis populo Romano fieret,” Sall. J. 83, 1.—With subj. alone: “qui postularent, eos qui sibi Galliaeque bellum intulissent, sibi dederent,” Caes. B. G. 4, 16, 3.—With de: “sapientes homines a senatu de foedere postulaverunt,” Cic. Balb. 15, 34: “Ariovistus legatos ad eum mittit, quod antea de colloquio postulasset, id per se fieri licere,” Caes. B. G. 1, 42.—With inf., freq. to be rendered, to wish, like, want: qui lepide postulat alterum frustrari, Enn. ap. Gell. 18, 2, 7 (Sat. 32 Vahl.): “hic postulat se Romae absolvi, qui, etc.,” Cic. Verr. 2, 3, 60, § 138: “o facinus impudicum! quam liberam esse oporteat, servire postulare,” Plaut. Rud. 2, 3, 62; id. Men. 2, 3, 88: “me ducere istis dictis postulas?” Ter. And. 4, 1, 20; id. Eun. 1, 1, 16: “(lupinum) ne spargi quidem postulat decidens sponte,” Plin. 18, 14, 36, § 135: “si me tibi praemandere postulas,” Gell. 4, 1, 11.—With a double object: quas (sollicitudines) levare tua te prudentia postulat, demands of you, Luccei. ap. Cic. Fam. 5, 14, 2. —With nom. and inf.: “qui postulat deus credi,” Curt. 6, 11, 24.— II. In partic., in jurid. lang. A. To summon, arraign before a court, to prosecute, accuse, impeach (syn.: accuso, insimulo); constr. class. usu. with de and abl., post-Aug. also with gen.): “Gabinium tres adhuc factiones postulant: L. Lentulus, qui jam de majestate postulavit,” Cic. Q. Fr. 3, 1, 5, § 15: “aliquem apud praetorem de pecuniis repetundis,” id. Cornel. Fragm. 1: “aliquem repetundis,” Tac. A. 3, 38: “aliquem majestatis,” id. ib. 1, 74: “aliquem repetundarum,” Suet. Caes. 4: aliquem aliquā lege, Cael. ap. Cic. Fam. 8, 12, 3: “aliquem ex aliquā causā reum,” Plin. 33, 2, 8, § 33: “aliquem impietatis reum,” Plin. Ep. 7, 33, 7: “aliquem injuriarum,” Suet. Aug. 56 fin.: “aliquem capitis,” Dig. 46, 1, 53: “qui (infames) postulare prohibentur,” Paul. Sent. 1, 2, 1.— B. To demand a writ or leave to prosecute, from the prætor or other magistrate: “postulare est desiderium suum vel amici sui in jure apud eum qui jurisdictioni praeest exponere vel alterius desiderio contradicere, etc.,” Dig. 3, 1, 1; cf. “this whole section: De postulando: in aliquem delationem nominis postulare,” Cic. Div. in Caecil. 20, 64: “postulare servos in quaestionem,” id. Rosc. Am. 28, 77: “quaestionem,” Liv. 2, 29, 5.— C. For the usual expostulare, to complain of one: “quom patrem adeas postulatum,” Plaut. Bacch. 3, 3, 38 (but in id. Mil. 2, 6, 35, the correct read. is expostulare; v. Ritschl ad h. l.).—* D. Postulare votum (lit. to ask a desire, i. e.), to vow, App. Flor. init.— E. Of the seller, to demand a price, ask (post-class. for posco): “pro eis (libris) trecentos Philippeos postulasse,” Lact. 1, 6, 10; cf.: “accipe victori populus quod postulat aurum,” Juv. 7, 243. — III. Transf., of things. A. To contain, measure: “jugerum sex modios seminis postulat,” Col. 2, 9, 17.— B. To need, require: “cepina magis frequenter subactam postulat terram,” Col. 11, 3, 56.—Hence, po-stŭlātum , i, n.; usually in plur.: po-stŭlāta , ōrum, a demand, request (class.): “intolerabilia postulata,” Cic. Fam. 12, 4, 1; id. Phil. 12, 12, 28: deferre postulata alicujus ad aliquem, Caes. B. C. 1, 9: “cognoscere de postulatis alicujus,” id. B. G. 4, 11 fin.: “postulata facere,” Nep. Alcib. 8, 4.

“conversational postulate” – an otiosity deviced by Lakoff and Gordon (or Gordon and Lakoff) after Carnap’s infamous meaning postulate, a sentence that specifies part or all of the meaning of a predicate. Meaning postulates would thus include explicit, contextual, and recursive definitions, reduction sentences for dispositional predicates, and, more generally, any sentences stating how the extensions of predicates are interrelated by virtue of the meanings of those predicates. For example, any reduction sentence of the form (x) (x has f / (x is malleable S x has y)) could be a meaning postulate for the predicate ‘is malleable’. The notion of a meaning postulate was introduced by Carnap, whose original interest stemmed from a desire to explicate sentences that are analytic (“true by virtue of meaning”) but not logically true. Where G is a set of such postulates, one could say that A is analytic with respect to G if and only if A is a logical consequence of G. On this account, e.g., the sentence ‘Jake is not a married bachelor’ is analytic with respect to {’All bachelors are unmarried’}.

Mechanism. A monster. But on p. 286 of WoW he speaks of mechanism, and psychological mechanism. Or rather of this or that psychological mechanism to be BENEFICIAL for a mouse that wants to eat a piece of cheese. He uses it twice, and it’s the OPERATION of the mechanism which is beneficial. So a psychophysical correspondence is desirable for the psychological mechanism to operate in a way that is beneficial for the sentient creature. Later in that essay he now applies ‘mechanism’ to communication, and he speak of a ‘communication mechanism’ being beneficial. In particular he is having in mind Davidson’s transcendental argument for the truth of the transmitted beliefs. “If all our transfers involved mistaken beliefs, it is not clear that the communication mechanism would be beneficial for the institution of ‘shared experience.’” Refs.: H. P. Grice, “My twelve labours.”

mechanistic explanation, a kind of explanation countenanced by views that range from the extreme position that all natural phenomena can be explained entirely in terms of masses in motion of the sort postulated in Newtonian mechanics, to little more than a commitment to naturalistic explanations. Mechanism in its extreme form is clearly false because numerous physical phenomena of the most ordinary sort cannot be explained entirely in terms of masses in motion. Mechanics is only one small part of physics. Historically, explanations were designated as mechanistic to indicate that they included no reference to final causes or vital forces. In this weak sense, all present-day scientific explanations are mechanistic. The adequacy of mechanistic explanation is usually raised in connection with living creatures, especially those capable of deliberate action. For example, chromosomes lining up opposite their partners in preparation for meiosis looks like anything but a purely mechanical process, and yet the more we discover about the process, the more mechanistic it turns out to be. The mechanisms responsible for meiosis arose through variation and selection and cannot be totally understood without reference to the evolutionary process, but meiosis as it takes place at any one time appears to be a purely mechanistic physicochemical meaning, conceptual role theory of mechanistic explanation process. Intentional behavior is the phenomenon that is most resistant to explanation entirely in physicochemical terms. The problem is not that we do not know enough about the functioning of the central nervous system but that no matter how it turns out to work, we will be disinclined to explain human action entirely in terms of physicochemical processes. The justification for this disinclination tends to turn on what we mean when we describe people as behaving intentionally. Even so, we may simply be mistaken to ascribe more to human action than can be explained in terms of purely physicochemical processes. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Mechanism.”

Medina: Dominican theologian who taught theology at Alcalá and then at Salamanca. His major works are commentaries on Aquinas’s Summa theologica. Medina is often called the father of probabilism but scholars disagree on the legitimacy of this attribution. Support for it is contained in Medina’s commentary on Aquinas’s Prima secundae (1577). Medina denies that it is sufficient for an opinion to be probable that there are apparent reasons in its favor and that it is supported by many people. For then all errors would be probable. Rather, an opinion is probable if it can be followed without censure and reproof, as when wise persons state and support it with excellent reasons. Medina suggests the use of these criteria in decisions concerning moral dilemmas (Suma de casos morales [“Summa of Moral Questions”], 1580). P.Gar. Megarians, also called Megarics, a loose-knit group of Greek philosophers active in the fourth and early third centuries B.C., whose work in logic profoundly influenced the course of ancient philosophy. The name derives from that of Megara, the hometown of Euclid (died c.365 B.C.; unrelated to the later mathematician), who was an avid companion of Socrates and author of (lost) Socratic dialogues. Little is recorded about his views, and his legacy rests with his philosophical heirs. Most prominent of these was Eubulides, a contemporary and critic of Aristotle; he devised a host of logical paradoxes, including the liar and the sorites or heap paradoxes. To many this ingenuity seemed sheer eristic, a label some applied to him. One of his associates, Alexinus, was a leading critic of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, whose arguments he twitted in incisive parodies. Stilpo (c.380–c.300 B.C.), a native of Megara, was also famous for disputation but best known for his apatheia (impassivity). Rivaling the Cynics as a preacher of self-reliance, he once insisted, after his city and home were plundered, that he lost nothing of his own since he retained his knowledge and virtue. Zeno the Stoic was one of many followers he attracted. Most brilliant of the Megarians was Diodorus, nicknamed Cronus or “Old Fogey” (fl. 300 B.C.), who had an enormous impact on Stoicism and the skeptical Academy. Among the first explorers of propositional logic, he and his associates were called “the dialecticians,” a label that referred not to an organized school or set of doctrines but simply to their highly original forms of reasoning. Diodorus defined the possible narrowly as what either is or will be true, and the necessary broadly as what is true and will not be false. Against his associate Philo, the first proponent of material implication, he maintained that a conditional is true if and only if it is neverthe case that its antecedent is true and its consequent false. He argued that matter is atomic and that time and motion are likewise discrete. With an exhibitionist’s flair, he demonstrated that meaning is conventional by naming his servants “But” and “However.” Most celebrated is his Master (or Ruling) Argument, which turns on three propositions: (1) Every truth about the past is necessary; (2) nothing impossible follows from something possible; and (3) some things are possible that neither are nor will be true. His aim was apparently to establish his definition of possibility by showing that its negation in (3) is inconsistent with (1) and (2), which he regarded as obvious. Various Stoics, objecting to the implication of determinism here, sought to uphold a wider form of possibility by overturning (1) or (2). Diodorus’s fame made him a target of satire by eminent poets, and it is said that he expired from shame after failing to solve on the spot a puzzle Stilpo posed at a party.

Meinong: Austrian philosopher and psychologist, founder of Gegenstandstheorie, the theory of (existent and nonexistent intended) objects. He was the target of Russell’s criticisms of the idea of non-existent objects in his landmark essay “On Denoting” (1905). Meinong, after eight years at the Vienna Gymnasium, enrolled in the University of Vienna, studying German philology and history and completing a dissertation on Arnold von Brescia. After this period he became interested in philosophy as a result of his critical self-directed reading of Kant. At the suggestion of his teacher Franz Brentano, he undertook a systematic investigation of Hume’s empiricism, culminating in his first publications in philosophy, the “Hume-Studien,” Meinong was appointed Professor Extraordinarius at Graz (receiving promotion to Ordinarius), where he remained until his death. At Graz he established the first laboratory for experimental psychology in Austria, and was occupied with psychological as well as philosophical problems throughout his career. The Graz school of phenomenological psychology and philosophical semantics, which centered on Meinong and his students, made important contributions to object theory in philosophical semantics, metaphysics, ontology, value theory, epistemology, theory of evidence, possibility and probability, and the analysis of emotion, imagination, and abstraction. Meinong’s object theory is based on a version of Brentano’s immanent intentionality thesis, that every psychological state contains an intended object toward which the mental event (or, in a less common terminology, a mental act) is semantically directed. Meinong, however, rejects Brentano’s early view of the immanence of the intentional, maintaining that thought is directed toward transcendent mind-independent existent or non-existent objects. Meinong distinguishes between judgments about the being (Sein) of intended objects of thought, and judgments about their “so-being,” character, or nature (Sosein). He claims that every thought is intentionally directed toward the transcendent mind-independent object the thought purports to be “about,” which entails that in at least some cases contingently non-existent and even impossible objects, for instance Berkeley’s golden mountain and the round square, must be included as non-existent intended objects in the object theory semantic domain. Meinong further maintains that an intended object’s Sosein is independent of its Sein or ontological status, of whether or not the object happens to exist. This means, contrary to what many philosophers have supposed, that non-existent objects can truly possess the constitutive properties predicated of them in thought. Meinong’s object theory evolved over a period of years, and underwent many additions and revisions. In its mature form, the theory includes the following principles: (1) Thought can freely (even if falsely) assume the existence of any describable object (principle of unrestricted free assumption, or unbeschränkten Annahmefreiheit thesis); (2) Every thought is intentionally directed toward a transcendent, mind-independent intended object (modified intentionality thesis); (3) Every intended object has a nature, character, Sosein, “how-it-is,” “so-being,” or “being thus-and-so,” regardless of its ontological status (independence of Sosein from Sein thesis); (4) Being or non-being is not part of the Sosein of any intended object, nor of an object considered in itself (indifference thesis, or doctrine of the Aussersein of the homeless pure object); (5) There are two modes of being or Sein for intended objects: (a) spatiotemporal existence and (b) Platonic subsistence (Existenz/Bestand thesis); (6) There are some intended objects that do not have Sein at all, but neither exist nor subsist (objects of which it is true that there are no such objects). Object theory, unlike extensionalist semantics, makes it possible, as in much of ordinary and scientific thought and language, to refer to and truly predicate properties of non-existent objects. There are many misconceptions about Meinong’s theory, such as that reflected in the objection that Meinong is a super-Platonist who inflates ontology with non-existent objects that nevertheless have being in some sense, that object theory tolerates outright logical inconsistency rather than mere incompatibility of properties in the Soseine of impossible intended objects. Russell, in his reviews of Meinong’s theory in 1904–05, raises the problem of the existent round square, which seems to be existent by virtue of the independence of Sosein from Sein, and to be non-existent by virtue of being globally and simultaneously both round and square. Meinong’s response involves several complex distinctions, but it has been observed that to avoid the difficulty he need only appeal to the distinction between konstitutorisch or nuclear and ausserkonstitutorisch or extranuclear properties, adopted from a suggestion by his student Ernst Mally (1878–1944), according to which only ordinary nuclear properties like being red, round, or ten centimeters tall are part of the Sosein of any object, to the exclusion of categorical or extranuclear properties like being existent, determinate, possible, or impossible. This avoids counterexamples like the existent round square, because it limits the independence of Sosein from Sein exclusively to nuclear properties,implying that neither the existent nor the nonexistent round square can possibly have the (extranuclear) property of being existent or nonexistent in their respective Soseine, and cannot be said truly to have the properties of being existent or non-existent merely by free assumption and the independence of Sosein from Sein.

meliorism: the view that the world is neither completely good nor completely bad, and that incremental progress or regress depend on human actions. By creative intelligence and education we can improve the environment and social conditions. The position is first attributed to George Eliot and William James. Whitehead suggested that meliorism applies to God, who can both improve the world and draw sustenance from human efforts to improve the world.

Melissus: Grecian philosopher, traditionally classified as a member of the Eleatic School. He was also famous as the victorious commander in a preemptive attack by the Samians on an Athenian naval force (441 B.C.). Like Parmenides – who must have influenced Melissus, even though there is no evidence the two ever met – Melissus argues that “what-is” or “the real” cannot come into being out of nothing, cannot perish into nothing, is homogeneous, and is unchanging. Indeed, he argues explicitly (whereas Parmenides only implies) that there is only one such entity, that there is no void, and that even spatial rearrangement (metakosmesis) must be ruled out. But unlike Parmenides, Melissus deduces that what-is is temporally infinite (in significant contrast to Parmenides, regardless as to whether the latter held that what-is exists strictly in the “now” or that it exists non-temporally). Moreover, Melissus argues that what-is is spatially infinite (whereas Parmenides spoke of “bounds” and compared what-is to a well-made ball). Significantly, Melissus repeatedly speaks of “the One.” It is, then, in Melissus, more than in Parmenides or in Zeno, that we find the emphasis on monism. In a corollary to his main argument, Melissus argues that “if there were many things,” each would have to be – per impossibile – exactly like “the One.” This remark has been interpreted as issuing the challenge that was taken up by the atomists. But it is more reasonable to read it as a philosophical strategist’s preemptive strike: Melissus anticipates the move made in the pluralist systems of the second half of the fifth century, viz., positing a plurality of eternal and unchanging elements that undergo only spatial rearrangement.

Grice’s memory – Grice on temporary mnemonic state. Grice remembers. Grice reminisces. "someone hears a noise"  iff  "a (past) hearing of a nose is an elemnent in a total temporary state which is a member of a series of total temporary statess such that every member of the series would, given certain conditions, contain as al element a MEMORY of some EXPERIENCE which is an element in some previous member OR  contains as an element some experience a memory of which would, given certain conditions, occur as an element in some subsequent member;  there being no subject of members which is independent from all the rest." The retention of, or the capacity to retain, past experience or previously acquired information. There are two main philosophical questions about memory: (1) In what does memory consist? and (2) What constitutes knowing a fact on the basis of memory? Not all memory is remembering facts: there is remembering one’s perceiving or feeling or acting in a certain way – which, while it entails remembering the fact that one did experience in that way, must be more than that. And not all remembering of facts is knowledge of facts: an extremely hesitant attempt to remember an address, if one gets it right, counts as remembering the address even if one is too uncertain for this to count as knowing it. (1) Answers to the first question agree on some obvious points: that memory requires (a) a present and (b) a past state of, or event in, the subject, and (c) the right sort of internal and causal relations between the two. Also, we must distinguish between memory states (remembering for many years the name of one’s first-grade teacher) and memory occurrences (recalling the name when asked). A memory state is usually taken to be a disposition to display an appropriate memory occurrence given a suitable stimulus. But philosophers disagree about further specifics. On one theory (held by many empiricists from Hume to Russell, among others, but now largely discredited), occurrent memory consists in images of past experience (which have a special quality marking them as memory images) and that memory of facts is read off such image memory. This overlooks the point that people commonly remember facts without remembering when or how they learned them. A more sophisticated theory of factual memory (popular nowadays) holds that an occurrent memory of a fact requires, besides a past learning of it, (i) some sort of present mental representation of it (perhaps a linguistic one) and (ii) continuous storage between then and now of a representation of it. But condition (i) may not be conceptually necessary: a disposition to dial the right number when one wants to call home constitutes remembering the number (provided it is appropriately linked causally to past learning of the number) and manifesting that disposition is occurrently remembering the fact as to what the number is even if one does not in the process mentally represent that fact. Condition (ii) may also be too strong: it seems at least conceptually possible that a causal link sufficient for memory should be secured by a relation that does not involve anything continuous between the relevant past and present occurrences (in The Analysis of Mind, Russell countenanced this possibility and called it “mnemic causation”). (2) What must be added to remembering that p to get a case of knowing it because one remembers it? We saw that one must not be uncertain that p. Must one also have grounds for trusting one’s memory impression (its seeming to one that one remembers) that p? How could one have such grounds except by knowing them on the basis of memory? The facts one can know not on the basis of memory are limited at most to what one presently perceives and what one presently finds self-evident. If no memory belief qualifies as knowledge unless it is supported by memory knowledge of the reliability of one’s memory, then the process of qualifying as memory knowledge cannot succeed: there would be an endless chain, or loop, of facts – this belief is memory knowledge if and only if this other belief is, which is if and only if this other one is, and so on – which never becomes a set that entails that any belief is memory knowledge. On the basis of such reasoning a skeptic might deny the possibility of memory knowledge. We may avoid this consequence without going to the lax extreme of allowing that any correct memory impression is knowledge; we can impose the (frequently satisfied) requirement that one not have reasons specific to the particular case for believing that one’s memory impression might be unreliable. Finally, remembering that p becomes memory knowledge that p only if one believes that p because it seems to one that one remembers it. One might remember that p and confidently believe that p, but if one has no memory impression of having previously learned it, or one has such an impression but does not trust it and believes that p only for other reasons (or no reason), then one should not be counted as knowing that p on the basis of memory. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Memory and personal identity.” H. P. Grice, “Benjamin on Broad on ‘remembering’”

Mendel, Austrian discoverer of the basic ‘laws’ of heredity. An Augustinian monk who conducted plant-breeding experiments in a monastery garden in Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic), Mendel discovered that certain characters of a common variety of garden pea are transmitted in a strikingly regular way. The characters with which he dealt occur in two distinct states, e.g., pods that are smooth or ridged. In characters such as these, one state is dominant to its recessive partner, i.e., when varieties of each sort are crossed, all the offspring exhibit the dominant character. However, when the offspring of these crosses are themselves crossed, the result is a ratio of three dominants to one recessive. In modern terms, pairs of genes (alleles) separate at reproduction (segregation) and each offspring receives only one member of each pair. Of equal importance, the recessive character reappears unaffected by its temporary suppression. Alleles remain pure. Mendel also noted that the pairs of characters that he studied assort independently of each other, i.e., if two pairs of characters are followed through successive crosses, no statistical correlations in their transmission can be found. As genetics developed after the turn of the century, the simple “laws” that Mendel had set out were expanded and altered. Only a relatively few characters exhibit two distinct states, one dominant to the other. In many, the heterozygote exhibits an intermediate state. In addition, genes do not exist in isolation from each other but together on chromosomes. Only those genes that reside on different pairs of chromosomes assort in total independence of each other. During his research, Mendel corresponded with Karl von Nägeli (1817–91), a major authority in plant hybridization. Von Nägeli urged Mendel to cross varieties of the common hawkweed. When Mendel took his advice, he failed to discover the hereditary patterns that he had found in garden peas. In 1871 Mendel ceased his research to take charge of his monastery. In 1900 Hugo de Vries (1848–1935) stumbled upon several instances of three-to-one ratios while developing his own theory of the origin of species. No sooner did he publish his results than two young biologists announced independent discovery of what came to be known as Mendel’s laws. The founders of modern genetics abandoned attempts to work out the complexities of embryological development and concentrated just on transmission. As a result of several unfortunate misunderstandings, early Mendelian geneticists thought that their theory of genetics was incompatible with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Eventually, however, the two theories were merged to form the synthetic theory of evolution. In the process, R. A. Fisher (1890–1962) questioned the veracity of Mendel’s research, arguing that the only way that Mendel could have gotten data as good as he did was by sanitizing it. Present-day historians view all of the preceding events in a very different light. The science of heredity that developed at the turn of the century was so different from anything that Mendel had in mind that Mendel hardly warrants being considered its father. The neglect of Mendel’s work is made to seem so problematic only by reading later developments back into Mendel’s original paper. Like de Vries, Mendel was interested primarily in developing a theory of the origin of species. The results of Mendel’s research on the hawkweed brought into question the generalizability of the regularities that he had found in peas, but they supported his theory of species formation through hybridization. Similarly, the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws can be viewed as an instance of multiple, simultaneous discovery only by ignoring important differences in the views expressed by these authors. Finally, Mendel certainly did not mindlessly organize and report his data, but the methods that he used can be construed as questionable only in contrast to an overly empirical, inductive view of science. Perhaps Mendel was no Mendelian, but he was not a fraud either.

Mendelssohn, M.: German philosopher known as “the Jewish Socrates.” He began as a Bible and Talmud scholar. After moving to Berlin he learned Latin and German, and became a close friend of Lessing, who modeled the Jew in his play Nathan the Wise after him. Mendelssohn began writing on major philosophical topics of the day, and won a prize from the Berlin Academy in 1764. He was actively engaged in discussions about aesthetics, psychology, and religion, and offered an empirical, subjectivist view that was very popular at the time. His most famous writings are Morgenstunden (Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God, 1785), Phaedon (Phaedo, or on the Immortality of the Soul, 1767), and Jerusalem (1783). He contended that one could prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. He accepted the ontological argument and the argument from design. In Phaedo he argued that since the soul is a simple substance it is indestructible. Kant criticized his arguments in the first Critique. Mendelssohn was pressed by the Swiss scientist Lavater to explain why he, as a reasonable man, did not accept Christianity. At first he ignored the challenge, but finally set forth his philosophical views about religion and Judaism in Jerusalem, where he insisted that Judaism is not a set of doctrines but a set of practices. Reasonable persons can accept that there is a universal religion of reason, and there are practices that God has ordained that the Jews follow. Mendelssohn was a strong advocate of religious toleration and separation of church and state. His views played an important part in the emancipation of the Jews, and in the Jewish Enlightenment that flowered in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

mens rea versus mens casta – actus reus versus actus castus -- One of the two main prerequisites, along with “actus reus” for prima facie liability to criminal punishment in the English legal systems. To be punishable in such systems, one must not only have performed a legally prohibited action, such as killing another human being; one must have done so with a culpable state of mind, or mens rea. Such culpable mental states are of three kinds: they are either motivational states of purpose, cognitive states of belief, or the non-mental state of negligence. To illustrate each of these with respect to the act of killing: a killer may kill either having another’s death as ultimate purpose, or as mediate purpose on the way to achieving some further, ultimate end. Alternatively, the killer may act believing to a practical certainty that his act will result in another’s death, even though such death is an unwanted side effect, or he may believe that there is a substantial and unjustified risk that his act will cause another’s death. The actor may also be only negligent, which is to take an unreasonable risk of another’s death even if the actor is not aware either of such risk or of the lack of justification for taking it. Mens rea usually does not have to do with any awareness by the actor that the act done is either morally wrong or legally prohibited. Neither does mens rea have to do with any emotional state of guilt or remorse, either while one is acting or afterward. Sometimes in its older usages the term is taken to include the absence of excuses as well as the mental states necessary for prima facie liability; in such a usage, the requirement is helpfully labeled “general mens rea,” and the requirement above discussed is labeled “special mens rea.”

“Mentalese” – Grice on ‘modest mentalism’ -- the language of thought (the title of an essay by Fodor) or of “brain writing” (a term of Dennett’s); specifically, a languagelike medium of representation in which the contents of mental events are supposedly expressed or recorded. (The term was probably coined by Wilfrid Sellars, with whose views it was first associated.) If what one believes are propositions, then it is tempting to propose that believing something is having the Mentalese expression of that proposition somehow written in the relevant place in one’s mind or brain. Thinking a thought, at least on those occasions when we think “wordlessly” (without formulating our thoughts in sentences or phrases composed of words of a public language), thus appears to be a matter of creating a short-lived Mentalese expression in a special arena or work space in the mind. In a further application of the concept, the process of coming to understand a sentence of natural language can be viewed as one of translating the sentence into Mentalese. It has often been argued that this view of understanding only postpones the difficult questions of meaning, for it leaves unanswered the question of how Mentalese expressions come to have the meanings they do. There have been frequent attempts to develop versions of the hypothesis that mental activity is conducted in Mentalese, and just as frequent criticisms of these attempts. Some critics deny there is anything properly called representation in the mind or brain at all; others claim that the system of representation used by the brain is not enough like a natural language to be called a language. Even among defenders of Mentalese, it has seldom been claimed that all brains “speak” the same Mentalese.

mentalism: Cfr. ‘psychism,’ animism.’ ‘spiritualism,’ cfr. Grice’s modest mentalism; any theory that posits explicitly mental events and processes, where ‘mental’ means exhibiting intentionality, not necessarily being immaterial or non-physical. A mentalistic theory is couched in terms of belief, desire, thinking, feeling, hoping, etc. A scrupulously non-mentalistic theory would be couched entirely in extensional terms: it would refer only to behavior or to neurophysiological states and events. The attack on mentalism by behaviorists was led by B. F. Skinner, whose criticisms did not all depend on the assumption that mentalists were dualists, and the subsequent rise of cognitive science has restored a sort of mentalism (a “thoroughly modern mentalism,” as Fodor has called it) that is explicitly materialistic. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Myro’s modest mentalism.

mentatum: Grice prefers psi-transmission. He knows that ‘mentatum’ sounds too much like ‘mind,’ and the mind is part of the ‘rational soul,’ not even encompassing the rational pratical soul. If perhaps Grice was unhappy about the artificial flavour to saying that a word is a sign, Grice surely should have checked with all the Grecian-Roman cognates of mean, as in his favourite memorative-memorable distinction, and the many Grecian realisations, or with Old Roman mentire and mentare. Lewis and Short have “mentĭor,” f. mentire, L and S note, is prob. from root men-, whence mens and memini, q. v. The original meaning, they say, is to invent,  hence, but alla Umberto Eco with sign, mentire comes to mean in later use what Grice (if not the Grecians) holds is the opposite of mean. Short and Lewis render mentire as to lie, cheat, deceive, etc., to pretend, to declare falsely: mentior nisi or si mentior, a form of asseveration, I am a liar, if, etc.: But also, animistically (modest mentalism?) of things, as endowed with a mind. L and S go on: to deceive, impose upon, to deceive ones self, mistake, to lie or speak falsely about, to assert falsely, make a false promise about; to feign, counterfeit, imitate a shape, nature, etc.: to devise a falsehood,  to assume falsely,  to promise falsely, to invent, feign, of a poetical fiction: “ita mentitur (sc. Homerus),  Trop., of inanim. grammatical Subjects, as in Semel fac illud, mentitur tua quod subinde tussis, Do what your cough keeps falsely promising, i. e. die, Mart. 5, 39, 6. Do what your cough means! =imp. die!; hence, mentĭens,  a fallacy, sophism: quomodo mentientem, quem ψευδόμενον vocant, dissolvas;” mentītus, imitated, counterfeit, feigned (poet.): “mentita tela;” For “mentior,” indeed, there is a Griceian implicaturum involving rational control. The rendition of mentire as to lie stems from a figurative shift from to be mindful, or inventive, to have second thoughts" to "to lie, conjure up". But Grice would also have a look at cognate “memini,” since this is also cognate with “mind,” “mens,” and covers subtler instances of mean, as in Latinate, “mention,” as in Grices “use-mention” distinction. mĕmĭni, cognate with "mean" and German "meinen," to think = Grecian ὑπομένειν, await (cf. Schiffer, "remnants of meaning," if I think, I hesitate, and therefore re-main, cf. Grecian μεν- in μένω, Μέντωρ; μαν- in μαίνομαι, μάντις; μνᾶ- in μιμνήσκω, etc.; cf.: maneo, or manere, as in remain. The idea, as Schiffer well knows or means, being that if you think, you hesitate, and therefore, wait and remain], moneo, reminiscor [cf. reminiscence], mens, Minerva, etc. which L and S render as “to remember, recollect, to think of, be mindful of a thing; not to have forgotten a person or thing, to bear in mind (syn.: reminiscor, recordor).” Surely with a relative clause, and to make mention of, to mention a thing, either in speaking or writing (rare but class.). Hence. mĕmĭnens, mindful And then Grice would have a look at moneo, as in adMONish, also cognate is “mŏnĕo,” monere, causative from the root "men;" whence memini, q. v., mens (mind), mentio (mention); lit. to cause to think, to re-mind, put in mind of, bring to ones recollection; to admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach (syn.: hortor, suadeo, doceo). L and S are Griceian if not Grecian when they note that ‘monere’ can be used "without the accessory notion [implicaturum or entanglement, that is] of reminding or admonishing, in gen., to teach, instruct, tell, inform, point out; also, to announce, predict, foretell, even if also to punish, chastise (only in Tacitus): “puerili verbere moneri.” And surely, since he loved to re-minisced, Grice would have allowed to just earlier on just minisced. Short and Lewis indeed have rĕmĭniscor, which, as they point out, features the root men; whence mens, memini; and which they compare to comminiscere, v. comminiscor, to recall to mind, recollect, remember (syn. recordor), often used by the Old Romans  with with Grices beloved that-clause, for sure. For what is the good of reminiscing or comminiscing, if you cannot reminisce that Austin always reminded Grice that skipping the dictionary was his big mistake! If Grice uses mention, cognate with mean, he loved commenting Aristotle. And commentare is, again, cognate with mean. As opposed to the development of the root in Grecian, or English, in Roman the root for mens is quite represented in many Latinate cognates. But a Roman, if not a Grecian, would perhaps be puzzled by a Grice claiming, by intuition, to retrieve the necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of this or that expression. When the Roman is told that the Griceian did it for fun, he understands, and joins in the fun! Indeed, hardly a natural kind in the architecture of the world, but one that fascinated Grice and the Grecian philosophers before him! Communication.

Mercier: philosopher, a formative figure in NeoThomism and founder of the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie at Louvain. Created at the request of Pope Leo XIII, Mercier’s institute treated Aquinas as a subject of historical research and as a philosopher relevant to modern thought. His approach to Neo-Thomism was distinctive for its direct response to the epistemological challenges posed by idealism, rationalism, and positivism. Mercier’ epistemology was termed a criteriology; it intended to defend the certitude of the intellect against skepticism by providing an account of the motives and rules that guide judgment. Truth is affirmed by intellectual judgment by conforming itself not to the thing-in-itself but to its abstract apprehension. Since the certitude of judgment is a state of the cognitive faculty in the human soul, Mercier considered criteriology as psychology; see Critériologie générale ou Théorie générale de la certitude (1906), Origins of Contemporary Psychology (trans. 1918), and Manual of Scholastic Philosophy (trans. 1917–18).

mereology: The mereological implicaturum. Grice. "In a burst of inspiration, Leśniewski coins "mereology" on a Tuesday evening in March 1927, from the Grecian "μέρος," Polish for "part." From Leśniewski's Journal -- translation from the Polish by Grice: "Dear Anne, I have just coined a word. MEREOLOGY. I want to refer to a FORMA, not informal as in Husserl, which is in German, anyway (his section, "On the whole and the parts") theory of part-whole. I hope you love it! Love, L. --- "Leśniewski's tutee, another Pole, Alfred Tarski, in his Appendix E to Woodger oversimplified, out of envey's Leśniewski's formalism." "But then more loyal tutees (and tutees of tutees) of Lesniewski elaborated this "Polish mereology." "For a good selection of the literature on Polish mereology, see Srzednicki and Rickey (1984). For a survey of Polish mereology, see Simons (1987). Since 1980 or so, however, research on Polish mereology has been almost entirely historical in nature." Which is just as well. The theory of the totum and the pars. -- parts. Typically, a mereological theory employs notions such as the following: “proper part,” “mproper part,” “overlapping” (having a part in common), disjoint (not overlapping), mereological product (the “intersection” of overlapping objects), mereological sum (a collection of parts), mereological difference, the universal sum, mereological complement, and atom (that which has no proper parts). A formal mereology is an axiomatic system. Goodman’s “Calculus of Individuals” is compatible with Nominalism, i.e., no reference is made to sets, properties, or any other abstract entity. Goodman hopes that his mereology, with its many parallels to set theory, may provide an alternative to set theory as a foundation for mathematics. Fundamental and controversial implications of Goodman’s theories include their extensionality and collectivism. An extensional theory implies that for any individuals, x and y, x % y provided x and y have the same proper parts. One reason extensionality is controversial is that it rules out an object’s acquiring or losing a part, and therefore is inconsistent with commonsense beliefs such as that a car has a new tire or that a table has lost a sliver of wood. A second reason for controversy is that extensionality is incompatible with the belief that a statue and the piece of bronze of which it is made have the same parts and yet are diverse objects. Collectivism implies that any individuals, no matter how scattered, have a mereological sum or constitute an object. Moreover, according to collectivism, assembling or disassembling parts does not affect the existence of things, i.e., nothing is created or destroyed by assembly or disassembly, respectively. Thus, collectivism is incompatible with commonsense beliefs such as that when a watch is disassembled, it is destroyed, or that when certain parts are assembled, a watch is created. Because the aforementioned formal theories shun modality, they lack the resources to express the thesis that a whole has each of its parts necessarily. This thesis of mereological essentialism has recently been defended by Roderick Chisholm.

meritum, a meritarian is one who asserts the relevance of individual merit, as an independent justificatory condition, in attempts to design social structures or distribute goods. ‘Meritarianism’ is a recently coined term in social and political philosophy, closely related to ‘meritocracy’, and used to identify a range of related concerns that supplement or oppose egalitarian, utilitarian, and contractarian principles and principles based on entitlement, right, interest, and need, among others. For example, one can have a pressing need for an Olympic medal but not merit it; one can have the money to buy a masterpiece but not be worthy of it; one can have the right to a certain benefit but not deserve it. Meritarians assert that considerations of desert are always relevant and sometimes decisive in such cases. What counts as merit, and how important should it be in moral, social, and political decisions? Answers to these questions serve to distinguish one meritarian from another, and sometimes to blur the distinctions between the meritarian position and others. Merit may refer to any of these: comparative rank, capacities, abilities, effort, intention, or achievement. Moreover, there is a relevance condition to be met: to say that highest honors in a race should go to the most deserving is presumably to say that the honors should go to those with the relevant sort of merit – speed, e.g., rather than grace. Further, meritarians may differ about the strength of the merit principle, and how various political or social structures should be influenced by it.

meritocracy, in ordinary usage, a system in which advancement is based on ability and achievement, or one in which leadership roles are held by talented achievers. The term may also refer to an elite group of talented achievers. In philosophical usage, the term’s meaning is similar: a meritocracy is a scheme of social organization in which essential offices, and perhaps careers and jobs of all sorts are (a) open only to those who have the relevant qualifications for successful performance in them, or (b) awarded only to the candidates who are likely to perform the best, or (c) managed so that people advance in and retain their offices and jobs solely on the basis of the quality of their performance in them, or (d) all of the above.

Merleau-Ponty: philosopher disliked by Austin, loved by Grice, and described by Paul Ricoeur as “the greatest of the French phenomenologists.” MerleauPonty occupied the chair of child psychology and pedagogy at the Sorbonne and was later professor of philosophy at the Collège de France. His sudden death preceded completion of an important manuscript; this was later edited and published by Claude Lefort under the title The Visible and the Invisible. The relation between the late, unfinished work and his early Phenomenology of Perception (1945) has received much scholarly discussion. While some commentators see a significant shift in direction in his later thought, others insist on continuity throughout his work. Thus, the exact significance of his philosophy, which in his life was called both a philosophy of ambiguity and an ambiguous philosophy, retains to this day its essential ambiguity. With his compatriot and friend, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty was responsible for introducing the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl into France. Impressed above all by the later Husserl and by Husserl’s notion of the life-world (Lebenswelt), Merleau-Ponty combined Husserl’s transcendental approach to epistemological issues with an existential orientation derived from Heidegger and Marcel. Going even further than Heidegger, who had himself sought to go beyond Husserl by “existentializing” Husserl’s Transcendental Ego (referring to it as Dasein), MerleauPonty sought to emphasize not only the existential (worldly) nature of the human subject but, above all, its bodily nature. Thus his philosophy could be characterized as a philosophy of the lived body or the body subject (le corps propre). Although Nietzsche called attention to the all-importance of the body, it was MerleauPonty who first made the body the central theme of a detailed philosophical analysis. This provided an original perspective from which to rethink such perennial philosophical issues as the nature of knowledge, freedom, time (temporality), language, and intersubjectivity. Especially in his early work, Merleau-Ponty battled against absolutist thought (“la pensée de l’absolu”), stressing the insurmountable ambiguity and contingency of all meaning and truth. An archopponent of Cartesian rationalism, he was an early and ardent spokesman for that position now called antifoundationalism. Merleau-Ponty’s major early work, the Phenomenology of Perception, is best known for its central thesis concerning “the primacy of perception.” In this lengthy study he argued that all the “higher” functions of consciousness (e.g., intellection, volition) are rooted in and depend upon the subject’s prereflective, bodily existence, i.e., perception (“All consciousness is perceptual, even the consciousness of ourselves”). MerleauPonty maintained, however, that perception had never been adequately conceptualized by traditional philosophy. Thus the book was to a large extent a dialectical confrontation with what he took to be the two main forms of objective thinking – intellectualism and empiricism – both of which, he argued, ignored the phenomenon of perception. His principal goal was to get beyond the intellectual constructs of traditional philosophy (such as sense-data) and to effect “a return to the phenomena,” to the world as we actually experience it as embodied subjects prior to all theorizing. His main argument (directed against mainline philosophy) was that the lived body is not an object in the world, distinct from the knowing subject (as in Descartes), but is the subject’s own point of view on the world; the body is itself the original knowing subject (albeit a nonor prepersonal, “anonymous” subject), from which all other forms of knowledge derive, even that of geometry. As a phenomenological (or, as he also said, “archaeological”) attempt to unearth the basic (corporeal) modalities of human existence, emphasizing the rootedness (enracinement) of the personal subject in the obscure and ambiguous life of the body and, in this way, the insurpassable contingency of all meaning, the Phenomenology was immediately and widely recognized as a major statement of French existentialism. In his subsequent work in the late 1940s and the 1950s, in many shorter essays and articles, Merleau-Ponty spelled out in greater detail the philosophical consequences of “the primacy of perception.” These writings sought to respond to widespread objections that by “grounding” all intellectual and cultural acquisitions in the prereflective and prepersonal life of the body, the Phenomenology of Perception results in a kind of reductionism and anti-intellectualism and teaches only a “bad ambiguity,” i.e., completely undermines the notions of reason and truth. By shifting his attention from the phenomenon of perception to that of (creative) expression, his aim was to work out a “good ambiguity” by showing how “communication with others and thought take up and go beyond the realm of perception which initiated us to the truth.” His announced goal after the Phenomenology was “working out in a rigorous way the philosophical foundations” of a theory of truth and a theory of intersubjectivity (including a theory of history). No such large-scale work (a sequel, as it were, to the Phenomenology) ever saw the light of day, although in pursuing this project he reflected on subjects as diverse as painting, literary language, Saussurian linguistics, structuralist anthropology, politics, history, the human sciences, psychoanalysis, contemporary science (including biology), and the philosophy of nature. Toward the end of his life, however, MerleauPonty did begin work on a projected large-scale manuscript, the remnants of which were published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible. A remarkable feature of this work (as Claude Lefort has pointed out) is the resolute way in which Merleau-Ponty appears to be groping for a new philosophical language. His express concerns in this abortive manuscript are explicitly ontological (as opposed to the more limited phenomenological concerns of his early work), and he consistently tries to avoid the subject (consciousness)–object language of the philosophy of consciousness (inherited from Husserl’s transcendental idealism) that characterized the Phenomenology of Perception. Although much of Merleau-Ponty’s later thought was a response to the later Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty sets himself apart from Heidegger in this unfinished work by claiming that the only ontology possible is an indirect one that can have no direct access to Being itself. Indeed, had he completed it, Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology would probably have been one in which, as Lefort has remarked, “the word Being would not have to be uttered.” He was always keenly attuned to “the sensible world”; the key term in his ontological thinking is not so much ‘Being’ as it is ‘the flesh’, a term with no equivalent in the history of philosophy. What traditional philosophy referred to as “subject” and “object” were not two distinct sorts of reality, but merely “differentiations of one sole and massive adhesion to Being [Nature] which is the flesh.” By viewing the perceiving subject as “a coiling over of the visible upon the visible,” Merleau-Ponty was attempting to overcome the subject–object dichotomy of modern philosophy, which raised the intractable problems of the external world and other minds. With the notion of the flesh he believed he could finally overcome the solipsism of modern philosophy and had discovered the basis for a genuine intersubjectivity (conceived of as basically an intercorporeity). Does ‘flesh’ signify something significantly different from ‘body’ in Merleau-Ponty’s earlier thought? Did his growing concern with ontology (and the question of nature) signal abandonment of his earlier phenomenology (to which the question of nature is foreign)? This has remained a principal subject of conflicting interpretations in Merleau-Ponty scholarship. As illustrated by his last, unfinished work, Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre as a whole is fragmentary. He always insisted that true philosophy is the enemy of the system, and he disavowed closure and completion. While Heidegger has had numerous disciples and epigones, it is difficult to imagine what a “Merleau-Ponty school of philosophy” would be. This is not to deny that Merleau-Ponty’s work has exerted considerable influence. Although he was relegated to a kind of intellectual purgatory in France almost immediately upon his death, the work of his poststructuralist successors such as Foucault and Jacques Derrida betrays a great debt to his previous struggles with philosophical modernity. And in Germany, Great Britain, and, above all, North America, Merleau-Ponty has continued to be a source of philosophical inspiration and the subject of extensive scholarship. Although his work does not presume to answer the key questions of existence, it is a salient model of philosophy conceived of as unremitting interrogation. It is this questioning (“zetetic”) attitude, combined with a non-dogmatic humanism, that continues to speak not only to philosophers but also to a wide audience among practitioners of the human sciences (phenomenological psychology being a particularly noteworthy example). Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception is unpopular at Oxford,” J. L. Austin, “What Merleau-Ponty thinks he perceives.”

Mersenne: he compiled massive works on philosophy, mathematics, music, and natural science, and conducted an enormous correspondence with such figures as Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes. He translated Galileo’s Mechanics and Herbert of Cherbury’s De Veritate and arranged for publication of Hobbes’s De Cive. He is best known for gathering the objections published with Descartes’s Meditations. Mersenne served a function in the rise of modern philosophy and science that is today served by professional journals and associations. His works contain attacks on deists, atheists, libertines, and skeptics; but he also presents mitigated skepticism as a practical method for attaining scientific knowledge. He did not believe that we can attain knowledge of inner essences, but argued – by displaying it – that we have an immense amount of knowledge about the material world adequate to our needs. Like Gassendi, Mersenne advocated mechanistic explanations in science, and following Galileo, he proposed mathematical models of material phenomena. Like the Epicureans, he believed that mechanism was adequate to save the phenomena. He thus rejected Aristotelian forms and occult powers. Mersenne was another of the great philosopher-priests of the seventeenth century who believed that to increase scientific knowledge is to know and serve God.

merton: merton holds a portrait of H. P. Grice. And the association is closer. Grice was sometime Harmsworth Scholar at Merton. It was at Merton he got the acquaintance with S. Watson, later historian at St. John’s. Merton is the see of the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy. What does that mean? It means that the Lit. Hum. covers more than philosophy. Grice was Lit. Hum. (Phil.), which means that his focus was on this ‘sub-faculty.’ The faculty itself is for Lit. Hum. in general, and it is not held anywhere specifically. Grice loved Ryle’s games with this:: “Oxford is a universale, with St. John’s being a particulare which can become your sense-datum.’

meta-ethics. “philosophia moralis” was te traditional label – until Nowell-Smith. Hare is professor of moral philosophy, not meta-ethics. Strictly, ‘philosophia practica’ as opposed to ‘philosophia speculativa’. Philosophia speculativa is distinguished from philosophia practica; the former is further differentiated into physica, mathematica, and theologia; the latter into moralis, oeconomica and politica.  Surely the philosophical mode does not change when he goes into ethics or other disciplines. Philosophy is ENTIRE. Ethics relates to metaphysics, but this does not mean that the philosopher is a moralist. In this respect, unlike, say Philippa Foot, Grice remains a meta-ethicist. Grice is ‘meta-ethically’ an futilitarian, since he provides a utilitarian backing of Kantian rationalism, within his empiricist, naturalist, temperament. For Grice it is complicated, since there is an ethical or practical side even to an eschatological argument. Grice’s views on ethics are Oxonian. At Oxford, meta-ethics is a generational thing: there’s Grice, and the palaeo-Gricieans, and the post-Gricieans. There’s Hampshire, and Hare, and Nowell-Smith, and Warnock. P. H. Nowell Smith felt overwhelmed by Grice’s cleverness and they would hardly engage in meta-ethical questions. But Nowell Smith felt that Grice was ‘too clever.’ Grice objected Hare’s use of descriptivism and Strawsons use of definite descriptor. Grice preferred to say “the the.”. “Surely Hare is wrong when sticking with his anti-descriptivist diatribe. Even his dictum is descriptive!” Grice was amused that it all started with Abbott BEFORE 1879, since Abbott’s first attempt was entitled, “Kant’s theory of ethics, or practical philosophy” (1873). ”! Grices explorations on morals are language based. With a substantial knowledge of the classical languages (that are so good at verb systems and modes like the optative, that English lacks), Grice explores modals like should, (Hampshire) ought to (Hare) and, must (Grice ‒ necessity). Grice is well aware of Hares reflections on the neustic qualifications on the phrastic. The imperative has usually been one source for the philosophers concern with the language of morals. Grice attempts to balance this with a similar exploration on good, now regarded as the value-paradeigmatic notion par excellence. We cannot understand, to echo Strawson, the concept of a person unless we understand the concept of a good person, i.e. the philosopher’s conception of a good person.   Morals is very Oxonian. There were in Grices time only three chairs of philosophy at Oxford: the three W: the Waynflete chair of metaphysical philosophy, the Wykeham chair of logic (not philosophy, really), and the White chair of moral philosophy. Later, the Wilde chair of philosophical psychology was created. Grice was familiar with Austin’s cavalier attitude to morals as Whites professor of moral philosophy, succeeding Kneale. When Hare succeeds Austin, Grice knows that it is time to play with the neustic implicaturum! Grices approach to morals is very meta-ethical and starts with a fastidious (to use Blackburns characterisation, not mine!) exploration of modes related to propositional phrases involving should, ought to, and must. For Hampshire, should is the moral word par excellence. For Hare, it is ought. For Grice, it is only must that preserves that sort of necessity that, as a Kantian rationalist, he is looking for. However, Grice hastens to add that whatever hell say about the buletic, practical or boulomaic must must also apply to the doxastic must, as in What goes up must come down. That he did not hesitate to use necessity operators is clear from his axiomatic treatment, undertaken with Code, on Aristotelian categories of izzing and hazzing. To understand Grices view on ethics, we should return to the idea of creature construction in more detail. Suppose we are genitors-demigods-designing living creatures, creatures Grice calls Ps. To design a type of P is to specify a diagram and table for that type plus evaluative procedures, if any. The design is implemented in animal stuff-flesh and bones typically. Let us focus on one type of P-a very sophisticated type that Grice, borrowing from Locke, calls very intelligent rational Ps. Let me be a little more explicit, and a great deal more speculative, about the possible relation to ethics of my programme for philosophical psychology. I shall suppose that the genitorial programme has been realized to the point at which we have designed a class of Ps which, nearly following Locke, I might call very intelligent rational Ps. These Ps will be capable of putting themselves in the genitorial position, of asking how, if they were constructing themselves with a view to their own survival, they would execute this task; and, if we have done our work aright, their answer will be the same as ours . We might, indeed, envisage the contents of a highly general practical manual, which these Ps would be in a position to compile. The contents of the initial manual would have various kinds of generality which are connected with familiar discussions of universalizability. The Ps have, so far, been endowed only with the characteristics which belong to the genitorial justified psychological theory; so the manual will have to be formulated in terms of that theory, together with the concepts involved in the very general description of livingconditions which have been used to set up that theory; the manual will therefore have conceptual generality. There will be no way of singling out a special subclass of addressees, so the injunctions of the manual will have to be addressed, indifferently, to any very intelligent rational P, and will thus have generality of form. And since the manual can be thought of as being composed by each of the so far indistinguishable Ps, no P would include in the manual injunctions prescribing a certain line of conduct in circumstances to which he was not likely to be Subjects; nor indeed could he do so even if he would. So the circumstances for which conduct is prescribed could be presumed to be such as to be satisfied, from time to time, by any addressee; the manual, then, will have generality of application. Such a manual might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an immanuel; and the very intelligent rational Ps, each of whom both composes it and from time to time heeds it, might indeed be ourselves (in our better moments, of course). Refs.: Most of Grice’s theorizing on ethics counts as ‘meta-ethic,’ especially in connection with R. M. Hare, but also with less prescriptivist Oxonian philosophers such as Nowell-Smith, with his bestseller for Penguin, Austin, Warnock, and Hampshire. Keywords then are ‘ethic,’ and ‘moral.’ There are many essays on both Kantotle, i.e. on Aristotle and Kant. The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.

meta-language: versus object-language – where Russell actually means thing-language (German: meta-sprache und ding-sprache). In formal semantics, a language used to describe another language (the object language). The object language may be either a natural language or a formal language. The goal of a formal semantic theory is to provide an axiomatic or otherwise systematic theory of meaning for the object language. The metalanguage is used to specify the object language’s symbols and formation rules, which determine its grammatical sentences or well-formed formulas, and to assign meanings or interpretations to these sentences or formulas. For example, in an extensional semantics, the metalanguage is used to assign denotations to the singular terms, extensions to the general terms, and truth conditions to sentences. The standard format for assigning truth conditions, as in Tarski’s formulation of his “semantical conception of truth,” is a T-sentence, which takes the form ‘S is true if and only if p.’ Davidson adapted this format to the purposes of his truth-theoretic account of meaning. Examples of T-sentences, with English as the metalanguage, are ‘ “La neige est blanche” is true if and only if snow is white’, where the object langauge is French and the homophonic (Davidson) ‘“Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white’, where the object language is English as well. Although for formal purposes the distinction between metalanguage and object language must be maintained, in practice one can use a langauge to talk about expressions in the very same language. One can, in Carnap’s terms, shift 4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 560 from the material mode to the formal mode, e.g. from ‘Every veterinarian is an animal doctor’ to ‘ “Veterinarian” means “animal doctor”.’ This shift is important in discussions of synonymy and of the analytic–synthetic distinction. Carnap’s distinction corresponds to the use–mention distinction. We are speaking in the formal mode – we are mentioning a linguistic expression – when we ascribe a property to a word or other expression type, such as its spelling, pronunciation, meaning, or grammatical category, or when we speak of an expression token as misspelled, mispronounced, or misused. We are speaking in the material mode when we say “Reims is hard to find” but in the formal mode when we say “ ‘Reims’ is hard to pronounce.”

Triviality: Grice: “Austin once confessed that he felt it was unworthy of a philosopher to spend his time on trivialities, but what was he to do?” –

metaphilosophy, the theory of the nature of philosophy, especially its goals, methods, and fundamental assumptions. First-order philosophical inquiry includes such disciplines as epistemology, ontology, ethics, and value theory. It thus constitutes the main activity of philosophers, past and present. The philosophical study of firstorder philosophical inquiry raises philosophical inquiry to a higher order. Such higher-order inquiry is metaphilosophy. The first-order philosophical discipline of (e.g.) epistemology has the nature of knowledge as its main focus, but that discipline can itself be the focus of higher-order philosophical inquiry. The latter focus yields a species of metaphilosophy called metaepistemology. Two other prominent species are metaethics and metaontology. Each such branch of metaphilosophy studies the goals, methods, and fundamental assumptions of a first-order philosophical discipline. Typical metaphilosophical topics include (a) the conditions under which a claim is philosophical rather than non-philosophical, and (b) the conditions under which a first-order philosophical claim is either meaningful, true, or warranted. Metaepistemology, e.g., pursues not the nature of knowledge directly, but rather the conditions under which claims are genuinely epistemological and the conditions under which epistemological claims are either meaningful, or true, or warranted. The distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy has an analogue in the familiar distinction between mathematics and metamathematics. Questions about the autonomy, objectivity, relativity, and modal status of philosophical claims arise in metaphilosophy. Questions about autonomy concern the relationship of philosophy to such disciplines as those constituting the natural and social sciences. For instance, is philosophy methodologically independent of the natural sciences? Questions about objectivity and relativity concern the kind of truth and warrant available to philosophical claims. For instance, are philosophical truths characteristically, or ever, made true by mind-independent phenomena in the way that typical claims of the natural sciences supposedly are? Or, are philosophical truths unavoidably conventional, being fully determined by (and thus altogether relative to) linguistic conventions? Are they analytic rather than synthetic truths, and is knowledge of them a priori rather than a posteriori? Questions about modal status consider whether philosophical claims are necessary rather than contingent. Are philosophical claims necessarily true or false, in contrast to the contingent claims of the natural sciences? The foregoing questions identify major areas of controversy in contemporary metaphilosophy.

Metaphoricum implicaturum: Grice, “You’re the cream in my coffee” – “You’re the salt in my stew” – “You’re the starch in my collar” – “You’re the lace in my shoe.” metaphor, a figure of speech (or a trope) in which a word or phrase that literally denotes one thing is used to denote another, thereby implicitly comparing the two things. In the normal use of the sentence ‘The Mississippi is a river’, ‘river’ is used literally – or as some would prefer to say, used in its literal sense. By contrast, if one assertively uttered “Time is a river,” one would be using ‘river’ metaphorically – or be using it in a metaphorical sense. Metaphor has been a topic of philosophical discussion since Aristotle; in fact, it has almost certainly been more discussed by philosophers than all the other tropes together. Two themes are prominent in the discussions up to the nineteenth century. One is that metaphors, along with all the other tropes, are decorations of speech; hence the phrase ‘figures of speech’. Metaphors are adornments or figurations. They do not contribute to the cognitive meaning of the discourse; instead they lend it color, vividness, emotional impact, etc. Thus it was characteristic of the Enlightenment and proto-Enlightenment philosophers – Hobbes and Locke are good examples – to insist that though philosophers may sometimes have good reason to communicate their thought with metaphors, they themselves should do their thinking entirely without metaphors. The other theme prominent in discussions of metaphor up to the nineteenth century is that metaphors are, so far as their cognitive force is concerned, elliptical similes. The cognitive force of ‘Time is a river’, when ‘river’ in that sentence is used metaphorically, is the same as ‘Time is like a river’. What characterizes almost all theories of metaphor from the time of the Romantics up through our own century is the rejection of both these traditional themes. Metaphors – so it has been argued – are not cognitively dispensable decorations. They contribute to the cognitive meaning of our discourse; and they are indispensable, not only to religious discourse, but to ordinary, and even scientific, discourse, not to mention poetic. Nietzsche, indeed, went so far as to argue that all speech is metaphorical. And though no consensus has yet emerged on how and what metaphors contribute to meaning, nor how we recognize what they contribute, nearconsensus has emerged on the thesis that they do not work as elliptical similes. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Why it is not the case that you’re the cream in my coffee.”

Aristkantian metaphysical deduction: cf. the transcendental club. or argument. transcendental argument Metaphysics, epistemology An argument that starts from some accepted experience or fact to prove that there must be something which is beyond experience but which is a necessary condition for making the accepted experience or fact possible. The goal of a transcendental argument is to establish the transcendental dialectic truth of this precondition. If there is something X of which Y is a necessary condition, then Y must be true. This form of argument became prominent in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where he argued that the existence of some fundamental a priori concepts, namely the categories, and of space and time as pure forms of sensibility, are necessary to make experience possible. In contemporary philosophy, transcendental arguments are widely proposed as a way of refuting skepticism. Wittgenstein used this form of argument to reject the possibility of a private language that only the speaker could understand. Peter Strawson employs a transcendental argument to prove the perception-independent existence of material particulars and to reject a skeptical attitude toward the existence of other minds. There is disagreement about the kind of necessity involved in transcendental arguments, and Barry Stroud has raised important questions about the possibility of transcendental arguments succeeding. “A transcendental argument attempts to prove q by proving it is part of any correct explanation of p, by proving it a precondition of p’s possibility.” Nozick Philosophical Explanations transcendental deduction Metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics For Kant, the argument to prove that certain a priori concepts are legitimately, universally, necessarily, and exclusively applicable to objects of experience. Kant employed this form of argument to establish the legitimacy of space and time as the forms of intuition, of the claims of the moral law in the Critique of Practical Reason, and of the claims of the aesthetic judgment of taste in the Critique of Judgement. However, the most influential example of this form of argument appeared in the Critique of Pure Reason as the transcendental deduction of the categories. The metaphysical deduction set out the origin and character of the categories, and the task of the transcendental deduction was to demonstrate that these a priori concepts do apply to objects of experience and hence to prove the objective validity of the categories. The strategy of the proof is to show that objects can be thought of only by means of the categories. In sensibility, objects are subject to the forms of space and time. In understanding, experienced objects must stand under the conditions of the transcendental unity of apperception. Because these conditions require the determination of objects by the pure concepts of the understanding, there can be no experience that is not subject to the categories. The categories, therefore, are justified in their application to appearances as conditions of the possibility of experience. In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Kant extensively rewrote the transcendental deduction, although he held that the result remained the same. The first version emphasized the subjective unity of consciousness, while the second version stressed the objective character of the unity, and it is therefore possible to distinguish between a subjective and objective deduction. The second version was meant to clarify the argument, but remained extremely difficult to interpret and assess. The presence of the two versions of this fundamental argument makes interpretation even more demanding. Generally speaking, European philosophers prefer the subjective version, while Anglo-American philosophers prefer the objective version. The transcendental deduction of the categories was a revolutionary development in modern philosophy. It was the main device by which Kant sought to overcome the errors and limitations of both rationalism and empiricism and propelled philosophy into a new phase. “The explanation of the manner in which concepts can thus relate a priori to objects I entitle their transcendental deduction.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. metaphysical realism, in the widest sense, the view that (a) there are real objects (usually the view is concerned with spatiotemporal objects), (b) they exist independently of our experience or our knowledge of them, and (c) they have properties and enter into relations independently of the concepts with which we understand them or of the language with which we describe them. Anti-realism is any view that rejects one or more of these three theses, though if (a) is rejected the rejection of (b) and (c) follows trivially. (If it merely denies the existence of material things, then its traditional name is ‘idealism.’) Metaphysical realism, in all of its three parts, is shared by common sense, the sciences, and most philosophers. The chief objection to it is that we can form no conception of real objects, as understood by it, since any such conception must rest on the concepts we already have and on our language and experience. To accept the objection seems to imply that we can have no knowledge of real objects as they are in themselves, and that truth must not be understood as correspondence to such objects. But this itself has an even farther reaching consequence: either (i) we should accept the seemingly absurd view that there are no real objects (since the objection equally well applies to minds and their states, to concepts and words, to properties and relations, to experiences, etc.), for we should hardly believe in the reality of something of which we can form no conception at all; or (ii) we must face the seemingly hopeless task of a drastic change in what we mean by ‘reality’, ‘concept’, ‘experience’, ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, and much else. On the other hand, the objection may be held to reduce to a mere tautology, amounting to ‘We (can) know reality only as we (can) know it’, and then it may be argued that no substantive thesis, which anti-realism claims to be, is derivable from a mere tautology. Yet even if the objection is a tautology, it serves to force us to avoid a simplistic view of our cognitive relationship to the world. In discussions of universals, metaphysical realism is the view that there are universals, and usually is contrasted with nominalism. But this either precludes a standard third alternative, namely conceptualism, or simply presupposes that concepts are general words (adjectives, common nouns, verbs) or uses of such words. If this presupposition is accepted, then indeed conceptualism would be the same as nominalism, but this should be argued, not legislated verbally. Traditional conceptualism holds that concepts are particular mental entities, or at least mental dispositions, that serve the classificatory function that universals have been supposed to serve and also explain the classificatory function that general words undoubtedly also serve. -- metaphysics, most generally, the philosophical investigation of the nature, constitution, and structure of reality. It is broader in scope than science, e.g., physics and even cosmology (the science of the nature, structure, and origin of the universe as a whole), since one of its traditional concerns is the existence of non-physical entities, e.g., God. It is also more fundamental, since it investigates questions science does not address but the answers to which it presupposes. Are there, for instance, physical objects at all, and does every event have a cause? So understood, metaphysics was rejected by positivism on the ground that its statements are “cognitively meaningless” since they are not empirically verifiable. More recent philosophers, such as Quine, reject metaphysics on the ground that science alone provides genuine knowledge. In The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism (1954), Bergmann argued that logical positivism, and any view such as Quine’s, presupposes a metaphysical theory. And the positivists’ criterion of cognitive meaning was never formulated in a way satisfactory even to them. A successor of the positivist attitude toward metaphysics is Grice’s tutee at St. John’s – for his Logic Paper for the PPE -- P. F. Strawson’s preference (especially in Individuals: an essay in descriptive metaphysics) for what he calls descriptive metaphysics, which is “content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world,” as contrasted with revisionary metaphysics, which is “concerned to produce a better structure.” The view, sometimes considered scientific (but an assumption rather than an argued theory), that all that there is, is spatiotemporal (a part of “nature”) and is knowable only through the methods of the sciences, is itself a metaphysics, namely metaphysical naturalism (not to be confused with natural philosophy). It is not part of science itself. In its most general sense, metaphysics may seem to coincide with philosophy as a whole, since anything philosophy investigates is presumably a part of reality, e.g., knowledge, values, and valid reasoning. But it is useful to reserve the investigation of such more specific topics for distinct branches of philosophy, e.g., epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and logic, since they raise problems peculiar to themselves. Perhaps the most familiar question in metaphysics is whether there are only material entities – materialism – or only mental entities, i.e., minds and their states – idealism – or both – dualism. Here ‘entity’ has its broadest sense: anything real. More specific questions of metaphysics concern the existence and nature of certain individuals – also called particulars – (e.g., God), or certain properties (e.g., are there properties that nothing exemplifies?) or relations (e.g., is there a relation of causation that is a necessary connection rather than a mere regular conjunction between events?). The nature of space and time is another important example of such a more specific topic. Are space and time peculiar individuals that “contain” ordinary individuals, or are they just systems of relations between individual things, such as being (spatially) higher or (temporally) prior. Whatever the answer, space and time are what render a world out of the totality of entities that are parts of it. Since on any account of knowledge, our knowledge of the world is extremely limited, concerning both its spatial and temporal dimensions and its inner constitution, we must allow for an indefinite number of possible ways the world may be, might have been, or will be. And this thought gives rise to the idea of an indefinite number of possible worlds. This idea is useful in making vivid our understanding of the nature of necessary truth (a necessarily true proposition is one that is true in all possible worlds) and thus is commonly employed in modal logic. But the idea can also make possible worlds seem real, a highly controversial doctrine. The notion of a spatiotemporal world is commonly that employed in discussions of the socalled issue of realism versus anti-realism, although this issue has also been raised with respect to universals, values, and numbers, which are not usually considered spatiotemporal. While there is no clear sense in asserting that nothing is real, there seems to be a clear sense in asserting that there is no spatiotemporal world, especially if it is added that there are minds and their ideas. This was Berkeley’s view. But contemporary philosophers who raise questions about the reality of the spatiotemporal world are not comfortable with Berkeleyan minds and ideas and usually just somewhat vaguely speak of “ourselves” and our “representations.” The latter are themselves often understood as material (states of our brains), a clearly inconsistent position for anyone denying the reality of the spatiotemporal world. Usually, the contemporary anti-realist does not actually deny it but rather adopts a view resembling Kant’s transcendental idealism. Our only conception of the world, the anti-realist would argue, rests on our perceptual and conceptual faculties, including our language. But then what reason do we have to think that this conception is true, that it corresponds to the world as the world is in itself? Had our faculties and language been different, surely we would have had very different conceptions of the world. And very different conceptions of it are possible even in terms of our present faculties, as seems to be shown by the fact that very different scientific theories can be supported by exactly the same data. So far, we do not have anti-realism proper. But it is only a short step to it: if our conception of an independent spatiotemporal world is necessarily subjective, then we have no good reason for supposing that there is such a world, especially since it seems selfcontradictory to speak of a conception that is independent of our conceptual faculties. It is clear that this question, like almost all the questions of general metaphysics, is at least in part epistemological. Metaphysics can also be understood in a more definite sense, suggested by Aristotle’s notion (in his Metaphysics, the title of which was given by an early editor of his works, not by Aristotle himself) of “first philosophy,” namely, the study of being qua being, i.e., of the most general and necessary characteristics that anything must have in order to count as a being, an entity (ens). Sometimes ‘ontology’ is used in this sense, but this is by no means common practice, ‘ontology’ being often used as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’. Examples of criteria (each of which is a major topic in metaphysics) that anything must meet in order to count as a being, an entity, are the following. (A) Every entity must be either an individual thing (e.g., Socrates and this book), or a property (e.g., Socrates’ color and the shape of this book), or a relation (e.g., marriage and the distance between two cities), or an event (e.g., Socrates’ death), or a state of affairs (e.g., Socrates’ having died), or a set (e.g., the set of Greek philosophers). These kinds of entities are usually called categories, and metaphysics is very much concerned with the question whether these are the only categories, or whether there are others, or whether some of them are not ultimate because they are reducible to others (e.g., events to states of affairs, or individual things to temporal series of events). (B) The existence, or being, of a thing is what makes it an entity. (C) Whatever has identity and is distinct from everything else is an entity. (D) The nature of the “connection” between an entity and its properties and relations is what makes it an entity. Every entity must have properties and perhaps must enter into relations with at least some other entities. (E) Every entity must be logically self-consistent. It is noteworthy that after announcing his project of first philosophy, Aristotle immediately embarked on a defense of the law of non-contradiction. Concerning (A) we may ask (i) whether at least some individual things (particulars) are substances, in the Aristotelian sense, i.e., enduring through time and changes in their properties and relations, or whether all individual things are momentary. In that case, the individuals of common sense (e.g., this book) are really temporal series of momentary individuals, perhaps events such as the book’s being on a table at a specific instant. We may also ask (ii) whether any entity has essential properties, i.e., properties without which it would not exist, or whether all properties are accidental, in the sense that the entity could exist even if it lost the property in question. We may ask (iii) whether properties and relations are particulars or universals, e.g., whether the color of this page and the color of the next page, which (let us assume) are exactly alike, are two distinct entities, each with its separate spatial location, or whether they are identical and thus one entity that is exemplified by, perhaps even located in, the two pages. Concerning (B), we may ask whether existence is itself a property. If it is, how is it to be understood, and if it is not, how are we to understand ‘x exists’ and ‘x does not exist’, which seem crucial to everyday and scientific discourse, just as the thoughts they express seem crucial to everyday and scientific thinking? Should we countenance, as Meinong did, objects having no existence, e.g. golden mountains, even though we can talk and think about them? We can talk and think about a golden mountain and even claim that it is true that the mountain is golden, while knowing all along that what we are thinking and talking about does not exist. If we do not construe non-existent objects as something, then we are committed to the somewhat startling view that everything exists. Concerning (C) we may ask how to construe informative identity statements, such as, to use Frege’s example, ‘The Evening Star is identical with the Morning Star’. This contrasts with trivial and perhaps degenerate statements, such as ‘The Evening Star is identical with the Evening Star’, which are almost never made in ordinary or scientific discourse. The former are essential to any coherent, systematic cognition (even to everyday recognition of persons and places). Yet they are puzzling. We cannot say that they assert of two things that they are one, even though ordinary language suggests precisely this. Neither can we just say that they assert that a certain thing is identical with itself, for this view would be obviously false if the statements are informative. The fact that Frege’s example includes definite descriptions (‘the Evening Star’, ‘the Morning Star’) is irrelevant, contrary to Russell’s view. Informative identity statements can also have as their subject terms proper names and even demonstrative pronouns (e.g., ‘Hesperus is identical with Phosphorus’ and ‘This [the shape of this page] is identical with that [the shape of the next page]’), the reference of which is established not by description but ostensively, perhaps by actual pointing. Concerning (D) we can ask about the nature of the relationship, usually called instantiation or exemplification, between an entity and its properties and relations. Surely, there is such a relationship. But it can hardly be like an ordinary relation such as marriage that connects things of the same kind. And we can ask what is the connection between that relation and the entities it relates, e.g., the individual thing on one hand and its properties and relations on the other. Raising this question seems to lead to an infinite regress, as Bradley held; for the supposed connection is yet another relation to be connected with something else. But how do we avoid the regress? Surely, an individual thing and its properties and relations are not unrelated items. They have a certain unity. But what is its character? Moreover, we can hardly identify the individual thing except by reference to its properties and relations. Yet if we say, as some have, that it is nothing but a bundle of its properties and relations, could there not be another bundle of exactly the same properties and relations, yet distinct from the first one? (This question concerns the so-called problem of individuation, as well as the principle of the identity of indiscernibles.) If an individual is something other than its properties and relations (e.g., what has been called a bare particular), it would seem to be unobservable and thus perhaps unknowable. Concerning (E), virtually no philosopher has questioned the law of non-contradiction. But there are important questions about its status. Is it merely a linguistic convention? Some have held this, but it seems quite implausible. Is the law of non-contradiction a deep truth about being qua being? If it is, (E) connects closely with (B) and (C), for we can think of the concepts of self-consistency, identity, and existence as the most fundamental metaphysical concepts. They are also fundamental to logic, but logic, even if ultimately grounded in metaphysics, has a rich additional subject matter (sometimes merging with that of mathematics) and therefore is properly regarded as a separate branch of philosophy. The word ‘metaphysics’ has also been used in at least two other senses: first, the investigation of entities and states of affairs “transcending” human experience, in particular, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will (this was Kant’s conception of the sort of metaphysics that, according to him, required “critique”); and second, the investigation of any alleged supernatural or occult phenomena, such as ghosts and telekinesis. The first sense is properly philosophical, though seldom occurring today. The second is strictly popular, since the relevant supernatural phenomena are most questionable on both philosophical and scientific grounds. They should not be confused with the subject matter of philosophical theology, which may be thought of as part of metaphysics in the general philosophical sense, though it was included by Aristotle in the subject matter of metaphysics in his sense of the study of being qua being. Refs.: H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, “Seminars on Aristotle’s Categoriae,” Oxford.

metaphysical wisdom: J. London-born philosopher, cited by H. P. Grice in his third programme lecture on Metaphysics. “Wisdom used to say that metaphysics is nonsense, but INTERESTING nonsense.” Some more “contemporary” accounts of “metaphysics” sound, on the face of it at least, very different from either of these.   Consider, for example, from the OTHER place, John Wisdom's description of a metaphysical, shall we say, ‘statement’ – I prefer ‘utterance’ or pronouncement!  Wisdom says that a metaphysical, shall we say, ‘proposition’ is, characteristically, a sort of illuminating falsehood, a pointed paradox, which uses what Wisdom calls ‘ordinary language’ in a disturbing, baffling, and even shocking way, but not otiosely, but in order to make your tutee aware of a hidden difference or a hidden resemblance between this thing and that thing – a difference and a resemblance hidden by our ordinary ways of “talking.”  The metaphysician renders what is clear, obscure.  And the metaphysician MUST retort to some EXTRA-ordinary language, as Wisdom calls it!    Of course, to be fair to Wisdom and the OTHER place, Wisdom does not claim this to be a complete characterisation, nor perhaps a literally correct one.   Since Wisdom loves a figure of speech and a figure of thought!  Perhaps what Wisdom claims should *itself* be seen as an illuminating paradox, a meta-meta-physical one!  In any case, its relation to Aristotle's, or, closer to us, F. H. Bradley's, account of the matter is not obvious, is it?  But perhaps a relation CAN be established.   Certainly not every metaphysical statement is a paradox serving to call attention to an usually unnoticed difference or resemblance.   For many a metaphysical statement is so obscure (or unperspicuous, as I prefer) that it takes long training, usually at Oxford, before the metaphysician’s meaning can be grasped.  A paradox, such as Socrates’s, must operate with this or that familiar concept.  For the essence of a paradox is that it administers a shock, and you cannot shock your tutee when he is standing on such unfamiliar ground that he has no particular expectations.   Nevertheless there IS a connection between “metaphysics” and Wisdom's kind of paradox.   He is not speaking otiosely!  Suppose we consider the paradox:  i. Everyone is really always alone.   Considered by itself, it is no more than an epigram -- rather a flat one  - about the human condition.   The implicaturum, via hyperbole, is “I am being witty.”  The pronouncement (i)  might be said, at least, to minimise the difference between “being BY oneself” and “being WITH other people,” Heidegger’s “Mit-Sein.”  But now consider the pronouncement (i), not simply by itself, but surrounded and supported by a certain kind of “metaphysical” argument: by a “metaphysical” argument to the effect that what passes for “knowledge” of the other's mental or psychological process is, at best, an unverifiable conjecture, since the mind (or soul) and the body are totally distinct things, and the working of the mind (or soul, as Aristotle would prefer, ‘psyche’) is always withdrawn behind the screen of its bodily manifestations, as Witters would have it. (Not in vain Wisdom calls himself or hisself a disciple of Witters!)   When this solitude-affirming paradox, (i) is seen in the context of a general theory about the soul and the body and the possibilities and limits of so-called “knowledge” (as in “Knowledge of other minds,” to use Wisdom’s fashionable sobriquet), when it is seen as embodying such a “metaphysical” theory, indeed the paradox BECOMES clearly a “metaphysical” statement.   But the fact that the statement or proposition is most clearly seen as “metaphysical” in such a setting does not mean that there is no “metaphysics” at all in it when it is deprived of the setting. (Cf. my “The general theory of context.”). An utterance like  (ii) Everyone is alone.  invites us to change, for a moment at least and in one respect, our ordinary way of looking at and talking about things, and hints (or the metaphysician implicates rather) that the changed view the tutee gets is the truer, the profounder, view.   Cf. Cook Wilson, “What we know we know,” as delighting this air marshal. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Metaphysics,” in D. F. Pears, “The nature of metaphysics: the Third-Programme Lectures for 1953.”

methodological holism, also called metaphysical holism, the thesis that with respect to some system there is explanatory emergence, i.e., the laws of the more complex situations in the system are not deducible by way of any composition laws or laws of coexistence from the laws of the simpler or simplest situation(s). Explanatory emergence may exist in a system for any of the following reasons: that at some more complex level a variable interacts that does not do so at simpler levels, that a property of the “whole” interacts with properties of the “parts,” that the relevant variables interact by different laws at more complex levels owing to the complexity of the levels, or (the limiting case) that strict lawfulness breaks down at some more complex level. Thus, explanatory emergence does not presuppose descriptive emergence, the thesis that there are properties of “wholes” (or more complex situations) that cannot be defined through the properties of the “parts” (or simpler situations). The opposite of methodological holism is methodological individualism, also called explanatory reductionism, according to which all laws of the “whole” (or more complex situations) can be deduced from a combination of the laws of the simpler or simplest situation(s) and either some composition laws or laws of coexistence (depending on whether or not there is descriptive emergence). Methodological individualists need not deny that there may be significant lawful connections among properties of the “whole,” but must insist that all such properties are either definable through, or connected by laws of coexistence with, properties of the “parts.”

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

middle knowledge, knowledge of a particular kind of propositions, now usually called “counterfactuals of freedom,” first attributed to God by Molina. These propositions state, concerning each possible free creature God could create, what that creature would do in each situation of (libertarian) free choice in which it could possibly find itself. The claim that God knows these propositions offers important theological advantages; it helps in explaining both how God can have foreknowledge of free actions and how God can maintain close providential control over a world containing libertarian freedom. Opponents of middle knowledge typically argue that it is impossible for there to be true counterfactuals of freedom.

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

Middle Platonism, the period of Platonism between Antiochus of Ascalon (c.130–68 B.C.) and Plotinus (A.D. 204–70), characterized by a rejection of the skeptical stance of the New Academy and by a gradual advance, with many individual variations, toward a comprehensive dogmatic position on metaphysical principles, while exhibiting a certain latitude, as between Stoicizing and Peripateticizing positions, in the sphere of ethics. Antiochus himself was much influenced by Stoic materialism (though disagreeing with the Stoics in ethics), but in the next generation a neo-Pythagorean influence made itself felt, generating the mix of doctrines that one may most properly term Middle Platonic. From Eudorus of Alexandria (fl. c.25 B.C.) on, a transcendental, two-world metaphysic prevailed, featuring a supreme god, or Monad, a secondary creator god, and a world soul, with which came a significant change in ethics, substituting, as an ‘end of goods’ (telos), “likeness to God” (from Plato, Theaetetus 176b), for the Stoicizing “assimilation to nature” of Antiochus. Our view of the period is hampered by a lack of surviving texts, but it is plain that, in the absence of a central validating authority (the Academy as an institution seems to have perished in the wake of the capture of Athens by Mithridates in 88 B.C.), a considerable variety of doctrine prevailed among individual Platonists and schools of Platonists, particularly in relation to a preference for Aristotelian or Stoic principles of ethics. Most known activity occurred in the late first and second centuries A.D. Chief figures in this period are Plutarch of Chaeronea (c.45–125), Calvenus Taurus (fl. c.145), and Atticus (fl. c.175), whose activity centered on Athens (though Plutarch remained loyal to Chaeronea in Boeotia); Gaius (fl. c.100) and Albinus (fl. c.130) – not to be identified with “Alcinous,” author of the Didaskalikos; the rhetorician Apuleius of Madaura (fl. c.150), who also composed a useful treatise on the life and doctrines of Plato; and the neo-Pythagoreans Moderatus of Gades (fl. c.90), Nicomachus of Gerasa (fl. c.140), and Numenius (fl. c.150), who do not, however, constitute a “school.” Good evidence for an earlier stage of Middle Platonism is provided by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (c.25 B.C.–A.D. 50). Perhaps the single most important figure for the later Platonism of Plotinus and his successors is Numenius, of whose works we have only fragments. His speculations on the nature of the first principle, however, do seem to have been a stimulus to Plotinus in his postulation of a supraessential One. Plutarch is important as a literary figure, though most of his serious philosophical works are lost; and the handbooks of Alcinous and Apuleius are significant for our understanding of second-century Platonism.

Middle Vitters: Grice: “Phrase used by H. P. Grice to refer to the middle period of Vitters’s philosophy. Vitters lived 54 years. The first Vitters goes from 0 to the third of his life. The latter Vitters go to the last third. The middle Vitters is the middle Vitters.” Plantinga, in revenge, refers to “the middle grice” as the pig in the middle of the trio. Refs.: Grice, “Strawson’s love for the middle Vitters.”

Miletusians, or Ionian Miletusians, or Milesians, the pre-Socratic philosophers of Miletus, a Grecian city-state on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes produced the earliest philosophies, stressing an “arche” or material source from which the cosmos and all things in it were generated: water for Thales, and then there’s air, fire, and earth – the fifth Grice called the ‘quintessentia.’

Mill: Scots-born philosopher (“One should take grice to one mill but not to the mill –“ Grice --) and social theorist. He applied the utilitarianism of his contemporary Bentham to such social matters as systems of education and government, law and penal systems, and colonial policy. He also advocated the associationism of Hume. Mill was an influential thinker in early nineteenth-century London, but his most important role in the history of philosophy was the influence he had on his son, J. S. Mill. He raised his more famous son as a living experiment in his associationist theory of education. His utilitarian views were developed and extended by J. S. Mill, while his associationism was also adopted by his son and became a precursor of the latter’s phenomenalism.

Mill, Scots London-born empiricist philosopher and utilitarian social reformer. He was the son of Mill, a leading defender of Bentham’s utilitarianism, and an advocate of reforms based on that philosophy. Mill was educated by his father (and thus “at Oxford we always considered him an outsider!” – Grice) in accordance with the principles of the associationist psychology adopted by the Benthamites and deriving from David Hartley, and was raised with the expectation that he would become a defender of the principles of the Benthamite school. Mill begins the study of Grecian at three and Roman at eight, and later assisted Mill in educating his brothers. He went to France to learn the language (“sc. French --” Grice ), and studied chemistry and mathematics at Montpellier. He wrote regularly for the Westminster Review, the Benthamite journal. He underwent a mental crisis that lasted some months. This he later attributed to his rigid education; in any case he emerged from a period of deep depression still advocating utilitarianism but in a very much revised version. Mill visits Paris during the revolution, meeting Lafayette and other popular leaders, and was introduced to the writings of Saint-Simon and Comte. He also met Harriet Taylor, to whom he immediately became devoted. They married only in 1851, when Taylor died. He joined the India House headquarters of the East India Company, serving as an examiner until the company was dissolved in 1858 in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny. Mill sat in Parliament. Harriet dies and is buried at Avignon, where Mill thereafter regularly resided for half of each year. Mill’s major works are his “System of Logic, Deductive and Inductive,” “Political Economy,” “On Liberty,” “Utilitarianism,” in Fraser’s Magazine, “The Subjection of Women” – Grice: “I wrote a paper for Hardie on this. His only comment was: ‘what do you mean by ‘of’?” --; “An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy,” and “Religion.” His writing style is excellent, and his history of his own mental development, the “Autobiography” is a major Victorian literary text. His main opponents philosophically are Whewell and Hamilton, and it is safe to say that after Mill their intuitionism in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and ethics could no longer be defended. Mill’s own views were later to be eclipsed by those of such Oxonian lumaries as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and the other Oxonian Hegelian idealists (Bosanquet, Pater). His views in metaphysics and philosophy of science have been revived and defended by Russell and the logical positivists, while his utilitarian ethics has regained its status as one of the major ethical theories. His social philosophy deeply infuenced the Fabians and other groups on the English left; its impact continues. Mill was brought up on the basis of, and to believe in, the strict utilitarianism of his father. His own development largely consisted in his attempts to broaden it, to include a larger and more sympathetic view of human nature, and to humanize its program to fit this broader view of human beings. In his own view, no doubt largely correct, he did not so much reject his father’s principles as fill in the gaps and eliminate rigidities and crudities. He continued throughout his life his father’s concern to propagate principles conceived as essential to promoting human happiness. These extended from moral principles to principles of political economy to principles of logic and metaphysics. Mill’s vision of the human being was rooted in the psychological theories he defended. Arguing against the intuitionism of Reid and Whewell, he extended the associationism of his father. On this theory, ideas have their genetic antecedents in sensation, a complex idea being generated out of a unique set of simple, elementary ideas, through associations based on regular patterns in the presented sensations. Psychological analysis reveals the elementary parts of ideas and is thus the means for investigating the causal origins of our ideas. The elder Mill followed Locke in conceiving analysis on the model of definition, so that the psychological elements are present in the idea they compose and the idea is nothing but its associated elements. Mill emerged from his mental crisis with the recognition that mental states are often more than the sum of the ideas that are their genetic antecedents. On the revised model of analysis, the analytical elements are not actually present in the idea, but are present only dispositionally, ready to be recovered by association under the analytical set. Moreover, it is words that are defined, not ideas, though words become general only by becoming associated with ideas. Analysis thus became an empirical task, rather than something settled a priori according to one’s metaphysical predispositions, as it had been for Mill’s predecessors. The revised psychology allowed the younger Mill to account empirically in a much more subtle way than could the earlier associationists for the variations in our states of feeling. Thus, for example, the original motive to action is simple sensations of pleasure, but through association things originally desired as means become associated with pleasure and thereby become desirable as ends, as parts of one’s pleasure. But these acquired motives are not merely the sum of the simple pleasures that make them up; they are more than the sum of those genetic antecedents. Thus, while Mill holds with his father that persons seek to maximize their pleasures, unlike his father he also holds that not all ends are selfish, and that pleasures are not only quantitatively but also qualitatively distinct. In ethics, then, Mill can hold with the intuitionists that our moral sentiments are qualitatively distinct from the lower pleasures, while denying the intuitionist conclusion that they are innate. Mill urges, with his father and Bentham, that the basic moral norm is the principle of utility, that an action is right provided it maximizes human welfare. Persons always act to maximize their own pleasure, but the general human welfare can be among the pleasures they seek. Mill’s position thus does not have the problems that the apparently egoistic psychology of his father created. The only issue is whether a person ought to maximize human welfare, whether he ought to be the sort of person who is so motivated. Mill’s own ethics is that this is indeed what one ought to be, and he tries to bring this state of human being about in others by example, and by urging them to expand the range of their human sympathy through poetry like that of Wordsworth, through reading the great moral teachers such as Jesus and Socrates, and by other means of moral improvement. Mill also offers an argument in defense of the principle of utility. Against those who, like Whewell, argue that there is no basic right to pleasure, he argues that as a matter of psychological fact, people seek only pleasure, and concludes that it is therefore pointless to suggest that they ought to do anything other than this. The test of experience thus excludes ends other than pleasure. This is a plausible argument. Less plausible is his further argument that since each seeks her own pleasure, the general good is the (ultimate) aim of all. This latter argument unfortunately presupposes the invalid premise that the law for a whole follows from laws about the individual parts of the whole. Other moral rules can be justified by their utility and the test of experience. For example, such principles of justice as the rules of property and of promise keeping are justified by their role in serving certain fundamental human needs. Exceptions to such secondary rules can be justified by appeal to the principle of utility. But there is also utility in not requiring in every application a lengthy utilitarian calculation, which provides an objective justification for overlooking what might be, objectively considered in terms of the principle of utility, an exception to a secondary rule. Logic and philosophy of science. The test of experience is also brought to bear on norms other than those of morality, e.g., those of logic and philosophy of science. Mill argues, against the rationalists, that science is not demonstrative from intuited premises. Reason in the sense of deductive logic is not a logic of proof but a logic of consistency. The basic axioms of any science are derived through generalization from experience. The axioms are generic and delimit a range of possible hypotheses about the specific subject matter to which they are applied. It is then the task of experiment and, more generally, observation to eliminate the false and determine which hypothesis is true. The axioms, the most generic of which is the law of the uniformity of nature, are arrived at not by this sort of process of elimination but by induction by simple enumeration: Mill argues plausibly that on the basis of experience this method becomes more reliable the more generic is the hypothesis that it is used to justify. But like Hume, Mill holds that for any generalization from experience the evidence can never be sufficient to eliminate all possibility of doubt. Explanation for Mill, as for the logical positivists, is by subsumption under matter-of-fact generalizations. Causal generalizations that state sufficient or necessary and sufficient conditions are more desirable as explanations than mere regularities. Still more desirable is a law or body of laws that gives necessary and sufficient conditions for any state of a system, i.e., a body of laws for which there are no explanatory gaps. As for explanation of laws, this can proceed either by filling in gaps or by subsuming the law under a generic theory that unifies the laws of several areas. Mill argues that in the social sciences the subject matter is too complex to apply the normal methods of experiment. But he also rejects the purely deductive method of the Benthamite political economists such as his father and David Ricardo. Rather, one must deduce the laws for wholes, i.e., the laws of economics and sociology, from the laws for the parts, i.e., the laws of psychology, and then test these derived laws against the accumulated data of history. Mill got the idea for this methodology of the social sciences from Comte, but unfortunately it is vitiated by the false idea, already noted, that one can deduce without any further premise the laws for wholes from the laws for the parts. Subsequent methodologists of the social sciences have come to substitute the more reasonable methods of statistics for this invalid method Mill proposes. Mill’s account of scientific method does work well for empirical sciences, such as the chemistry of his day. He was able to show, too, that it made good sense of a great deal of physics, though it is arguable that it cannot do justice to theories that explain the atomic and subatomic structure of matter – something Mill himself was prepared to acknowledge. He also attempted to apply his views to geometry, and even more implausibly, to arithmetic. In these areas, he was certainly bested by Whewell, and the world had to wait for the logical work of Russell and Whitehead before a reasonable empiricist account of these areas became available. Metaphysics. The starting point of all inference is the sort of observation we make through our senses, and since we know by experience that we have no ideas that do not derive from sense experience, it follows that we cannot conceive a world beyond what we know by sense. To be sure, we can form generic concepts, such as that of an event, which enable us to form concepts of entities that we cannot experience, e.g., the concept of the tiny speck of sand that stopped my watch or the concept of the event that is the cause of my present sensation. Mill held that what we know of the laws of sensation is sufficient to make it reasonable to suppose that the immediate cause of one’s present sensation is the state of one’s nervous system. Our concept of an objective physical object is also of this sort; it is the set of events that jointly constitute a permanent possible cause of sensation. It is our inductive knowledge of laws that justifies our beliefs that there are entities that fall under these concepts. The point is that these entities, while unsensed, are (we reasonably believe) part of the world we know by means of our senses. The contrast is to such things as the substances and transcendent Ideas of rationalists, or the God of religious believers, entities that can be known only by means that go beyond sense and inductive inferences therefrom. Mill remained essentially pre-Darwinian, and was willing to allow the plausibility of the hypothesis that there is an intelligent designer for the perceived order in the universe. But this has the status of a scientific hypothesis rather than a belief in a substance or a personal God transcending the world of experience and time. Whewell, at once the defender of rationalist ideas for science and for ethics and the defender of established religion, is a special object for Mill’s scorn. Social and political thought. While Mill is respectful of the teachings of religious leaders such as Jesus, the institutions of religion, like those of government and of the economy, are all to be subjected to criticism based on the principle of utility: Do they contribute to human welfare? Are there any alternatives that could do better? Thus, Mill argues that a free-market economy has many benefits but that the defects, in terms of poverty for many, that result from private ownership of the means of production may imply that we should institute the alternative of socialism or public ownership of the means of production. He similarly argues for the utility of liberty as a social institution: under such a social order individuality will be encouraged, and this individuality in turn tends to produce innovations in knowledge, technology, and morality that contribute significantly to improving the general welfare. Conversely, institutions and traditions that stifle individuality, as religious institutions often do, should gradually be reformed. Similar considerations argue on the one hand for democratic representative government and on the other for a legal system of rights that can defend individuals from the tyranny of public opinion and of the majority. Status of women. Among the things for which Mill campaigned were women’s rights, women’s suffrage, and equal access for women to education and to occupations. He could not escape his age and continued to hold that it was undesirable for a woman to work to help support her family. While he disagreed with his father and Bentham that all motives are egoistic and self-interested, he nonetheless held that in most affairs of economics and government such motives are dominant. He was therefore led to disagree with his father that votes for women are unnecessary since the male can speak for the family. Women’s votes are needed precisely to check the pursuit of male self-interest. More generally, equality is essential if the interests of the family as such are to be served, rather than making the family serve male self-interest as had hitherto been the case. Changing the relation between men and women to one of equality will force both parties to curb their self-interest and broaden their social sympathies to include others. Women’s suffrage is an essential step toward the moral improvement of humankind. Grice: “I am fascinated by how Griceian Mill can be.” “In treating of the ‘proposition,’ some considerations of a comparatively elementary nature respecting its form must be premised,and the ‘import’ which the emisor conveyed by a token of an expression of a ‘proposition’ – for one cannot communicate but that the cat is on the mat -- . A proposition is a move in the conversational game in which a feature (P) is predicated of the subject (S) – The S is P – The subject and the predicate – as in “Strawson’s dog is shaggy” -- are all that is necessarily required to make up a proposition. But as we can not conclude from merely seeing two “Strawson’s dog” and “shaggy” put together, that “Strawson’s dog” is the subject and “shaggy” the predicate, that is, that the predicate is intended to be ‘predicated’ of the subject, it is necessary that there should be some mode or form of indicating that such is, in Griceian parlance, the ‘intention,’ sc. some sign to signal this predication – my father says that as I was growing up, I would say “dog shaggy” – The explicit communication of a predication is sometimes done by a slight alteration of the expression that is the predicate or the expression that is the subject – sc., a ‘casus’ – even if it is ‘rectum’ – or ‘obliquum’ --  inflectum.” Grice: “The example Mill gives is “Fire burns.”” “The change from ‘burn’ to ‘burns’ shows that the emisor intends to predicate the predicate “burn” of the subject “fire.” But this function is more commonly fulfilled by the copula, which serves the purporse of the sign of predication, “est,” (or by nothing at all as in my beloved Grecian! “Anthropos logikos,” -- when the predication is, again to use Griceian parlance, ‘intended.’” Grice: “Mill gives the example, ‘The king of France is smooth.” “It may seem to be implied, or implicated – implicatum, implicaturum -- not only that the quality ‘smooth’ can be predicated of the king of France, but moreover that there is a King of France. Grice: “Mill notes: ‘It’s different with ‘It is not the case that the king of France is smooth’”. “This, however should not rush us to think that ‘is’ is aequi-vocal, and that it can be ‘copula’ AND ‘praedicatum’, e. g. ‘… is a spatio-temporal continuant.’ Grice: “Mill then gives my example: ‘Pegasus is [in Grecian mythology – i. e. Pegasus is *believed* to exist by this or that Grecian mythographer], but does not exist.’” “A flying horse is a fiction of some Grecian poets.” Grice: “Mill hastens to add that the annulation of the implicaturum is implicit or contextual.” “By uttering ‘A flying horse is a Griceian allegory’ the emisor cannot possibly implicate that a flying horse is a spatio-temporal continuant, since by uttering the proposition itself the emisor is expressly asserting that the thing has no real existence.” “Many volumes might be filled” – Grice: “And will be filled by Strawson!” -- with the frivolous speculations concerning the nature of being (ƒø D½, øPÃw±, ens, entitas, essentia, and the like), which have arisen from overlooking the implicaturum of ‘est’; from supposing that when by uttering “S est P” the emisor communicates that S is a spatio-temporal continuant. when by uttering it, the emisor communicates that the S is some *specified* thing, a horse and a flier, to be a phantom, a mythological construct, or the invention of the journalists (like Marmaduke Bloggs, who climbed Mt. Everest on hands and knees) even to be a nonentity (as a squared circle) it must still, at bottom, answer to the same idea; and that a proposition must be found for it which shall suit all these cases. The fog which rises from this very narrow spot diffuses itself over the whole surface of ontology. Yet it becomes us not to triumph over the great intellect of Ariskant because we are now able to preserve ourselves from many errors into which he, perhaps inevitably, fell. The fire-teazer of a steam-engine produces by his exertions far greater effects than Milo of Crotona could, but he is not therefore a stronger man. The Grecians – like some uneducated Englishman -- seldom knew any language but their own! This render it far more difficult for *them* than it is for us, to acquire a readiness in detecting the implicaturum. One of the advantages of having accurately studied Grecian and Roman at Clifton, especially of those languages which Ariskant used as the vehicle of his thought, is the practical lesson we learn respecting the implicaturm, by finding that the same expression in Grecian, say (e. g. ‘is’) corresponds, on different occasions, to a different expression in Gricese, say (i. e. ‘hazz’). When not thus exercised, even the strongest understandings find it difficult to believe that things which fall under a class, have not in some respect or other a common nature; and often expend much labour very unprofitably (as is frequently done by Ariskant) in a vain attempt to discover in what this common nature consists. But, the habit once formed, intellects much inferior are capable of detecting even an impicaturum which is common or generalised to Grecian and Griceses: and it is surprising that this sous-entendu or impicaturum now under consideration, though it is ordinary at Oxford as well as in the ancient, should have been overlooked by almost every philosopher until Grice. Grice: “Mill was proud of Mill.” “The quantity of futilitarian speculation which had been caused by a misapprehension of the nature of the copula, is hinted at by Hobbes; but my father is the first who distinctly characterized the implicaturm, and point out to me how many errors in the received systems of philosophy it has had to answer for. It has, indeed, misled the moderns scarcely less than the ancients, though their mistakes, because our understandings are not yet so completely emancipated from their influence, do not appear equally irrational. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Grice to the Mill,” L. G. Wilton, “Mill’s mentalism,” for the Grice Club. Grice treasured Hardie’s invocation of Mill’s method during a traffic incident on the HIhg. Mill’s methods, procedures for discovering necessary conditions, sufficient conditions, and necessary and sufficient conditions, where these terms are used as follows: if whenever A then B (e.g., whenever there is a fire then oxygen is present), then B is a necessary (causal) condition for A; and if whenever C then D (e.g., whenever sugar is in water, then it dissolves), then C is a sufficient (causal) condition for D. Method of agreement. Given a pair of hypotheses about necessary conditions, e.g., (1) whenever A then B1 whenever A then B2, then an observation of an individual that is A but not B2 will eliminate the second alternative as false, enabling one to conclude that the uneliminated hypothesis is true. This method for discovering necessary conditions is called the method of agreement. To illustrate the method of agreement, suppose several people have all become ill upon eating potato salad at a restaurant, but have in other respects had quite different meals, some having meat, some vegetables, some desserts. Being ill and not eating meat eliminates the latter as the cause; being ill and not eating dessert eliminates the latter as cause; and so on. It is the condition in which the individuals who are ill agree that is not eliminated. We therefore conclude that this is the cause or necessary condition for the illness. Method of difference. Similarly, with respect to the pair of hypotheses concerning sufficient conditions, e.g., (2) whenever C1 then D whenever C2 then D, an individual that is C1 but not D will eliminate the first hypothesis and enable one to conclude that the second is true. This is the method of difference. A simple change will often yield an example of an inference to a sufficient condition by the method of difference. If something changes from C1 to C2, and also thereupon changes from notD to D, one can conclude that C2, in respect of which the instances differ, is the cause of D. Thus, Becquerel discovered that burns can be caused by radium, i.e., proximity to radium is a sufficient but not necessary condition for being burned, when he inferred that the radium he carried in a bottle in his pocket was the cause of a burn on his leg by noting that the presence of the radium was the only relevant causal difference between the time when the burn was present and the earlier time when it was not. Clearly, both methods can be generalized to cover any finite number of hypotheses in the set of alternatives. The two methods can be combined in the joint method of agreement and difference to yield the discovery of conditions that are both necessary and sufficient. Sometimes it is possible to eliminate an alternative, not on the basis of observation, but on the basis of previously inferred laws. If we know by previous inductions that no C2 is D, then observation is not needed to eliminate the second hypothesis of (2), and we can infer that what remains, or the residue, gives us the sufficient condition for D. Where an alternative is eliminated by previous inductions, we are said to use the method of residues. The methods may be generalized to cover quantitative laws. A cause of Q may be taken not to be a necessary and sufficient condition, but a factor P on whose magnitude the magnitude of Q functionally depends. If P varies when Q varies, then one can use methods of elimination to infer that P causes Q. This has been called the method of concomitant variation. More complicated methods are needed to infer what precisely is the function that correlates the two magnitudes. Clearly, if we are to conclude that one of (1) is true on the basis of the given data, we need an additional premise to the effect that there is at least one necessary condition for B and it is among the set consisting of A1 and A2. 4065m-r.qxd 08/02/1999 7:42 AM Page 571 Mimamsa mimesis 572 The existence claim here is known as a principle of determinism and the delimited range of alternatives is known as a principle of limited variety. Similar principles are needed for the other methods. Such principles are clearly empirical, and must be given prior inductive support if the methods of elimination are to be conclusive. In practice, generic scientific theories provide these principles to guide the experimenter. Thus, on the basis of the observations that justified Kepler’s laws, Newton was able to eliminate all hypotheses concerning the force that moved the planets about the sun save the inverse square law, provided that he also assumed as applying to this specific sort of system the generic theoretical framework established by his three laws of motion, which asserted that there exists a force accounting for the motion of the planets (determinism) and that this force satisfies certain conditions, e.g., the action-reaction law (limited variety). The eliminative methods constitute the basic logic of the experimental method in science. They were first elaborated by Francis Bacon (see J. Weinberg, Abstraction, Relation, and Induction, 1965). They were restated by Hume, elaborated by J. F. W. Herschel, and located centrally in scientific methodology by J. S. Mill. Their structure was studied from the perspective of modern developments in logic by Keynes, W. E. Johnson, and especially Broad. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Grice to the Mill,” G. L. Brook, “Mill’s Mentalism”, Sutherland, “Mill in Dodgson’s Semiotics.”

Iconicity and mimesis. Grice: “If it hurts, you involuntarily go ‘Ouch.’ ‘Ouch’ can voluntarily become a vehicle for communication, under voluntary control. But we must allow for any expression to become a vehicle for communication, even if there is no iconic or mimetic association -- (from Greek mimesis, ‘imitation’), the modeling of one thing on another, or the presenting of one thing by another; imitation. The concept played a central role in the account formulated by Plato and Aristotle of what we would now call the fine arts. The poet, the dramatist, the painter, the musician, the sculptor, all compose a mimesis of reality. Though Plato, in his account of painting, definitely had in mind that the painter imitates physical reality, the general concept of mimesis used by Plato and Aristotle is usually better translated by ‘representation’ than by ‘imitation’: it belongs to the nature of the work of art to represent, to re-present, reality. This representational or mimetic theory of art remained far and away the dominant theory in the West until the rise of Romanticism – though by no means everyone agreed with Plato that it is concrete items of physical reality that the artist represents. The hold of the mimetic theory was broken by the insistence of the Romantics that, rather than the work of art being an imitation, it is the artist who, in his or her creative activity, imitates Nature or God by composing an autonomous object. Few contemporary theorists of art would say that the essence of art is to represent; the mimetic theory is all but dead. In part this is a reflection of the power of the Romantic alternative to the mimetic theory; in part it is a reflection of the rise to prominence over the last century of nonobjective, abstract painting and sculpture and of “absolute” instrumental music. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of representation has not ceased to draw the attention of theorists. In recent years three quite different general theories of representation have appeared: Nelson Goodman’s (The Languages of Art), Nicholas Wolterstorff’s (Works and Worlds of Art), and Kendall Walton’s (Mimesis as Make-Believe). Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Aristotle’s mimesis and Paget’s ta-ta theory of communication.”

Paget: author beloved by Grice, inventor of the ta-ta theory of communication.

The bellow -- “Ouch” – Grice’s theory of communication in “Meaning revisited.” Grice’s paradox of the ta-ta. Why would a simulation of pain be taken as a sign of pain if the sendee recognises that the emisor is simulating a ‘causally provoked,’ rather than under voluntary control, expression of pain. Grice’s wording is subtle and good. “Stage one in the operation involves the supposition that the creature actually voluntarily produces a certain sort of behaviour which is such that its nonvoluntary production would be evidence that the creature is, let us say, in pain.” Cf. Ockham, ‘risus naturaliter significat interiorem laetitiam.’ But the laughter does NOT resemble the inner joy. There is natural causality, but not iconicity. So what Grice and Ockham are after is ‘artificial laughter’ which does imitate (mimic) natural laughter. “Risus significat naturaliter interiorem laetitiam.” “Risus voluntaries significat NON-naturaliter interiorem laetitiam.” Ockham wants to say that it is via the iconicity of the artificial laughter that the communication is effected. So if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, non-natural communication recapitulates natural communication. “Risus voluntarius non-significat naturaliter (via risus involutarius significans naturaliter) interiorem laetitiam.  “The kinds of cases of this which come most obviously to mind will be cases of faking or deception.” “A creature normally voluntarily produces behaviour not only when, but *because*, its nonvoluntary production would be evidence that the creature is in a certain state, with the effect that the rest of the world, other creatures around, treat the production, which is in fact voluntary, as if it were a nonvoluntary production.” “That is, they come to just the same conclusion about the creature’s being in the state in question, the signalled state.” Note Grice’s technical use of Shannon’s ‘signal.’  “The purpose of the creature’s producing the behaviour voluntarily would be so that the rest of the world should think that it is in the state which the nonvoluntary production would signify.”  Note that at this point, while it is behaviour that signifies – the metabolia has to apply ultimately to the emisor. So that it is the creature who signifies – or it signifies. The fact that Grice uses ‘it’ for the creature is telling – For, if Grice claims that only rational Homo sapiens can communicate, Homo sapiens is an ‘it.’  “In stage two not only does creature X produce this behaviour voluntarily, instead of nonvoluntarily, as in the primitive state.” By primitive he means Stage 0. “… but we also assume that it is *recognised* by another creature Y, involved with X in some transaction, as being the voluntary production of certain form of behaviour the nonvoluntary production of which evidences, say, pain.” So again, there is no iconicity. Does the “Ouch” in Stage 0 ‘imitate’ the pain. How can ‘pain,’ which is a state of the soul, be ‘imitated’ via a physical, material, medium? There are ways. Pain may involve some discomfort in the soul. The cry, “Ouch,” involuntary, ‘imitates this disturbance or discomfort. But what about inner joy and the laughter. Ape studies have demonstrated that the show of teeth is a sign of agreession. It’s not Mona Lisa’s smile. So Mona Lisa’s inner joy is signified by her smile. Is this iconic? Is there a resemblance or imitation here? Yes. Because the inner joy is the opposite of discomfort, and the distended muscles around the mouth resemble the distended state of the immaterial soul of Mona Lisa. As a functionalist, Grice was also interested in the input. What makes Mona Lisa smile? What makes you to utter “Ouch” when you step on a thorn? Is the disturbance (of pain, since this is the example Grice uses) or the distension of joy resemble the external stimulus? Yes. Because a thorn on the ground is NOT to be there – it is a disturbance of the environment. Looking at Leonardo da Vinci who actually is commanding, “Smile!” is enough of a stimulus for “The Gioconda” to become what Italians call ‘the gioconda.’  “That is, creature X is now supposed not just to simulate pain-behaviour, but also to be recognised as simulating pain-behaviour.” “The import of the recognition by Y that the production is voluntary UNDERMINES, of course, any tendency on the part of Y to come to the conclusion that creature X is in pain.” “So, one might ask, what would be required to restore the situation: what COULD be ADDED which would be an ‘antidote,’ so to speak, to the dissolution on the part of Y of the idea that X is in pain?” “A first step in this direction would be to go to what we might think of as stage three.” “Here, we suppose that creature Y not only recognises that the behaviour is voluntary on the part of X, but also recognises that X *intends* Y to recognise HIS [no longer its] behaviour as voluntary.” “That is, we have now undermined the idea that this is a straightforward piece of deception.” “Deceiving consists in trying to get a creature to accept certain things AS SIGNS [but cf. Grice on words not being signs in ‘Meaning’] as something or other without knowing that this is a faked case.” “Here,  however, we would have a sort of perverse faked case, in which something is faked but at the same time a clear indication is put in that the faking has been done.” Cf. Warhol on Campbell soup and why Aristotle found ‘mimesis’ so key “Creature Y can be thought of as initially BAFFLED by this conflicting performance.” “There is this creature, as it were, simulating pain, but announcing, in a certain sense, that this is what IT [again it, not he] is doing.” “What on earth can IT be up to?” “It seems to me that if Y does raise the question of why X should be doing this, it might first come up with the idea that X is engaging in some form of play or make-believe, a game to which, since X’s behaviour is seemingly directed TOWARDS Y [alla Kurt Lewin], Y is EXPECTED OR INTENDED to make some appropriate contribution. “Cases susceptible of such an interpretation I regard as belonging to stage four.” “But, we may suppose, there might be cases which could NOT be handled in this way.” “If Y is to be expected to be a fellow-participant with X in some form of play, it ought to be possible for Y to recognise what kind of contribution Y [the sendee – the signalee] is supposed to make; and we can envisage the possibility that Y has no clue on which to base such recognition, or again that though SOME form of contribution seems to be SUGGESTED, when Y obliges by coming up with it, X, instead of producing further pain-behaviour, gets cross and perhaps repeats its original, and now problematic, performance.” [“Ouch!”].  “We now reach stage five, at which Y supposes not that X is engaged in play, but that what X is doing is trying to get Y to believe OR ACCEPT THAT X *is* in pain.” That is, not just faking that he is in pain, but faking that he is in pain because he IS in pain. Surely the pain cannot be that GROSS if he has time to consider all this! So “communicating pain” applies to “MINOR pain,” which the Epicureans called “communicable pains” (like a tooth-ache – Vitters after reading Diels, came up with the idea that Marius was wrong and that a tooth-pain is NOT communicable!  “: that is, trying to get Y to believe in or accept the presence of that state in X which the produced behaviour, when produced NONVOLUNTARILY, in in fact a natural sign of, naturally means.” Here the under-metabolis is avoidable: “when produced nonvolutarily, in in fact THE EFFECT OF, or the consequence of.” And if you want to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition: “that STATE in X of which the produced behaviour is the CONSEQUENCE or EFFECT. CAUSATUM. The causans-causatum distinction.  “More specifically, one might say that at stage five, creature Y recognises that creature X in the first place INTENDS that Y recognise the production of the sign of pain (of what is USUALLY the sign of pain) to be voluntary, and further intends that Y should regard this first intention I1 as being a sufficient reason for Y to BELIEVE that X is in pain.” But would that expectation occur in a one-off predicament? “And that X has these intentions because he has the additional further INTENTION I3 that Y should not MERELY have sufficient REASON for believing that X is in pain, but should actually [and AND] believe it.” This substep shows that for Grice it’s the INFLUENCING and being influenced by others (or the institution of decision), rather than the exchange of information (giving and receiving information), which is basic. The protreptic, not the exhibitive. “Whether or not in these circumstances X will not merely recognise that X intends, in a certain rather QUEER way, to get Y to believe that X is in pain, whether Y not only recognises this but actually goes on to believe that X is in pain, would presumably DEPEND on a FURTHER SET OF CONDITIONS which can be summed up under the general heading that Y should regard X as TRUSTWORTHY [as a good meta-faker!] in one or another of perhaps a variety of ways.” This is Grice’s nod to G. J. Warnock’s complex analysis of the variety of ways in which one can be said to be ‘trustworthy’ – last chapter of ‘trustworthiness in conversation,’ in Warnock’s brilliant, “The object of morality.” “For example, suppose Y thinks that, either in general or at least in THIS type of CASE [this token, a one-off predicament? Not likely!] X would NOT want Y to believe that X is in pain UNLESS [to use R. Hall and H. L. A. Hart’s favourite excluder defeater] X really WERE in pain.” [Cf. Hardie, “Why do you use the subjunctive?” “Were Hardie to be here, I would respond!” – Grice]. “Suppose also (this would perhaps not apply to a case of pain but might apply to THE COMMUNICATION of other states [what is communicated is ONLY a state of the soul] that Y also believes that X is trustworthy, not just in the sense of not being malignant [malevolent, ill-willed, maleficent], but also in the sense of being, as it were, in general [semiotically] responsible, for example, being the sort of creature, who takes adequate trouble to make sure that what HE [not it] is trying to get the other creature to believe is in fact the case.” Sill, “’I have a toothache” never entails that the emisor has a toothache! – a sign is anything we can lie with!” (Eco). “… and who is not careless, negligent, or rash.” “Then, given the general fulfilment of the idea that Y regards X either in general or in this particular case of being trustworthy in this kind of competent, careful, way, one would regard it as RATIONAL [reasonable] not only for Y to recognise these intentions on the part of X that Y should have certain beliefs about X’s being in pain, but also for Y actually to pass to adopting these beliefs.” Stage six annuls mimesis, or lifts  the requirement of mimesis – “we relax this requirement.” “As Judith Baker suggests, it would be unmanly to utter (or ‘let out’) a (natural) bellow!” Here Grice speaks of the decibels of the emission of the bellow – as indicating this or that degree of pain. But what about “It’s raining.” We have a state of affairs (not necessarily a state in the soul of the emissor). So by relaxing the requirement, the emissor chooses a behaviour which is “suggestive, in some recognizable way” with the state of affairs of rain “without the performance having to be the causal effect of (or ‘response to,’ as Grice also has it) that state of affairs, sc. that it is raining.  The connection becomes “non-natural,” or ‘artificial’: any link will do – as long as the correlation is OBVIOUS, pre-arranged, or foreknown. – ‘one-off predicament’. There are problems with ‘stage zero’ and ‘stage six.’ When it comes to stage zero, Grice is supposing, obviously that a state of affairs is the CAUSE of some behaviour in a creature – since there is no interpretant – the phenomenon may very obliquely called ‘semiotic.’ “If a tree falls in the wood and nobody is listening…” – So stage zero need not involve a mimetic aspect. Since stage one involves ‘pain,’ i.e. the proposition that ‘X is in pain,’ as Grice has it. Or as we would have it, ‘A is in pain’ or ‘The emisor is in pain.’ Althought he uses the metaphor of the play where B is expected or intended to make an appropriate contribution or move in the game, it is one of action, he will have to accept that ‘The emisor is in pain’ and act appropriately. But Grice is not at all interested in the cycle of what B might do – as Gardiner is, when he talks of a ‘conversational dyad.’ Grice explores the conversational ‘dyad’ in his Oxford lectures on the conversational imlicaturum. A poetic line might not do but: “A: I’m out of gas.” B: “There’s a garage round the corner.” – is the conversational dyad. In B’s behaviour, we come to see that he has accepted that A is out of gas. And his ‘appropriate contribution’ in the game goes beyond that acceptance – he makes a ‘sentence’ move (“There is a garage round the corner.”). So strictly a conversational implicaturum is the communicatum by the second item in a conversational dyad. Now there are connections to be made between stage zero and stage six. Why? Well, because stage six is intended to broaden the range of propositions that are communicated to be OTHER than a ‘state’ in the emisor – X is in pain --. But Grice does not elaborate on the ‘essential psychological attitude’ requirement. Even if we require this requirement – Grice considers two requirements. The requirement he is interested in relaxing is that of the CAUSAL connection – he keeps using ‘natural’ misleadingly --. But can he get rid of it so easily? Because in stage six, if the emisor wants to communicate that the cat is on the mat, or that it is raining, it will be via his BELIEF that the cat is on the mat or that it is raining. The cat being on the mat or it being raining would CAUSE the emisor to have that belief. Believing is the CAUSAL consequence. Grice makes a comparison between the mimesis or resemblance of a bellow produced voluntarily or not – and expands on the decibels. The ‘information’ one may derive at stage 0 of hearing an emisor (who is unaware that he is being observed) is one that is such and such – and it is decoded by de-correlating the decibels of the bellow. More decibels, higher pain. There is a co-relation here. Grice ventures that perhaps that’s too much information (he is following someone’s else objection). Why would not X just ‘let out a natural bellow.’ Grice states there are – OBVIOUSLY – varioius reasons why he would not – the ‘obviously’ implicates the objection is silly (typical tutee behaviour).  The first is charming. Grice, seeing the gender of the tutee, says that it woud be UNMANLY for A to let out a natural bellow. He realizes that ‘unmanly’ may be considered ‘artless sexism’ (this is the late mid-70s, and in the provinces!) – So he turns the ‘unmanly’ into the charmingly Oxonian, “ or otherwise uncreaturely.” – which is a genial piece of ironic coinage! Surely ‘manly’ and ‘unmanly,’ if it relates to ‘Homo sapiens,’ need not carry a sexist implicaturum. Another answer to the obvious objection that Grice gives relates to the level of informativeness – the ‘artificial’ (as he calls it) – His argument is that if one takes Aristotle’s seriously, and the ‘artificial bellow’ is to ‘imitate’ the ‘natural bellow,’ it may not replicate ALL THE ‘FEATURES’ – which is the expression Grice uses --  he means semiotic distinctive feature --. So he does not have to calculate the ‘artificial bellow’ to correlate exactly to the quantity of decibels that the ‘natural bellow’ does. This is important from a CAUSAL point of view, or in terms of Grice’s causal theory of behaviour. A specific pain (prooked by Stimulus S1) gives the RESPONSE R2 – with decibels D1. A different stimulus S2 woud give a different RESPONSE R2, with different decibels D2. So Grice is exploring the possibility of variance here. In a causal involuntary scenario, there is nothing the creature can do. The stimulus Sn will produce the creature Cn to be such that its response is Rn (where Rn is a response with decibels – this being the semiotic distinctive feature Fn – Dn. When it comes to the ‘artificial bellow,’ the emisor’s only point is to express the proposition, ‘I am in pain,’ and not ‘I am in pain such that it causes a natural bellow of decibels Dn,” which would flout the conversational postulate of conversational fortitude. The overinformativeness would baffle the sendee, if not the sender). At this point there is a break in the narrative, and Grice, in a typical Oxonian way, goes on to say, “But then, we might just as well relax the requirement that the proposition concerns a state of the sender.” He gives no specific example, but refers to a ‘state of affairs’ which does NOT involve a state of the sender – AND ONE TO WHICH, HOWEVER, THE SENDER RESPONDS with a behaviour. I. e. the state of the affairs, whatever it is, is the stimulus, and the creature’s behaviour is the response. While ‘The cat is on the mat’ or ‘It is raining’ does NOT obviously ‘communicate’ that the sender BELIEVES that to be, the ‘behaviour’ which is the response to the external state of affairs is mediated by this state – this is pure functionalism. So, in getting at stage six – due to the objection by his tutee – he must go back to stage zero. Now, he adds MANY CRUCIAL features with these relaxations of the requirements. Basically he is getting at GRICESE. And what he says is very jocular. He knows he is lecturing to ‘service professionals,’ not philosophers, so he keep adding irritating notes for them (but which we philosophers find charming), “and we get to something like what people are getting at (correctly, I would hope) when they speak of a semiotic system!” These characteristics are elaborated under ‘gricese’ – But in teleological terms they can even be ordered. What is the order that Grice uses? At this stage, he has already considered in detail the progression, with his ‘the dog is shaggy,’ so we know where he is getting at – but he does not want to get philosophically technical at the lecture. He is aiming then at compositionality. There is utterance-whole and utterance-part, or as he prefers ‘complete utterance’ and ‘non-complete utterance’. ‘dog’ and ‘shaggy’ would be non-complete. So the external ‘state of affairs’ is Grice’s seeing that Strawson’s dog is shaggy and wanting to communicate this to Pears (Grice co-wrote an essay only with two Englishmen, these being Strawson and Pears – ‘The three Englishmen’s essay,’ as he called it’ --. So there is a state of affairs, pretty harmless, Strawson’s dog is being shaggy – perhaps he needs a haircut, or some brooming. “Shaggy” derives from ‘shag’ plus –y, as in ‘’twas brillig.’ – so this tells that it is an adjectival or attribute predication – of the feature of being ‘shaggy’ to ‘dog.’ When the Anglo-Saxons first used ‘dog’ – the Anglo-Saxon ‘Adam,’ he should have used ‘hound’. Grice is not concerned at the point with ‘dog,’ since he KNOWS that Strawson’s dog is “Fido” – dogs being characteristically faithful and the Strawsons not being very original – “I kid” --. In this case, we need a ‘communication function.’ The sender perceives that Fido is shaggy and forms the proposition ‘Fido is shaggy.’ This is via his belief, caused by his seeing that Fido is shaggy. He COMPOSES a complete utterance. He could just utter, elliptically, ‘shaggy’ – but under quieter circumstances, he manages to PREDICATE ‘shagginess’ to Strawson’s dog – and comes out with “Fido is shaggy.” That is all the ‘syntactics’ that Gricese needs (Palmer, “Remember when all we had to care about was nouns and verbs?”) (Strictly, “I miss the good old days when all we had to care was nouns and verbs”). Well here we have a ‘verb,’ “is,” and a noun – “nomen adjectivum” – or ‘adjective noun’, shaggy. Grice is suggesting that the lexicon (or corpus) is hardly relevant. What is important is the syntax. Having had to read Chomsky under Austin’s tutelage (they spent four Saturday mornings with the Mouton paperback, and Grice would later send a letter of recommendation on one of his tutees for study with Chomsky overseas). But Grice has also read Peano. So he needs a set of FINITE set of formation rules – that will produce an INFINITE SET of ‘sentences’ where Grice highers the decibels when he says ‘infinite,’ hoping it will upset the rare Whiteheadian philosopher in the audience! Having come up with “Fido is shaggy,’ the sender sends it to the sendee. “Any link will do” – The link is ‘arranged’ somehow – arranged simpliciter in a one-off predicament, or pre-arranged in two-off predicament, etc. Stages 2, 3, 4, and 5 – have all to do with ‘trustworthy’ – which would one think otiose seeing that Sir John Lyons has said that prevarication in the golden plover and the Homo sapiens is an essential feature of language! (But we are at the Oxford of Warnock!). So, the sender sends “Fido is shaggy,’ and Pears gets it. He takes Grice to be expressing his belief that Strawson’s dog is shaggy, and comes not only to accept that Grice believes this, but to accept that Strawson’s dog is shaggy. As it happens, Pears recommends a bar of soap to make his hairs at least look ‘cuter.’ Refs.: H. P. Grice, “A teleological model of communication.”

minimal transformationalism. Grice was proud that his system PIROTESE ‘allowed for the most minimal transformations.” transformational grammar Philosophy of language The most powerful of the three kinds of grammar distinguished by Chomsky. The other two are finite-state grammar and phrasestructure grammar. Transformational grammar is a replacement for phrase-structure grammar that (1) analyzes only the constituents in the structure of a sentence; (2) provides a set of phrase-structure rules that generate abstract phrase-structure representations; (and 3) holds that the simplest sentences are produced according to these rules. Transformational grammar provides a further set of transformational rules to show that all complex sentences are formed from simple elements. These rules manipulate elements and otherwise rearrange structures to give the surface structures of sentences. Whereas phrase-structure rules only change one symbol to another in a sentence, transformational rules show that items of a given grammatical form can be transformed into items of a different grammatical form. For example, they can show the transformation of negative sentences into positive ones, question sentences into affirmative ones and passive sentences into active ones. Transformational grammar is presented as an improvement over other forms of grammar and provides a model to account for the ability of a speaker to generate new sentences on the basis of limited data. “The central idea of transformational grammar is determined by repeated application of certain formal operations called ‘grammatical transformations’ to objects of a more elementary sort.” Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

miracle, an extraordinary event brought about by God. In the medieval understanding of nature, objects have certain natural powers and tendencies to exercise those powers under certain circumstances. Stones have the power to fall to the ground, and the tendency to exercise that power when liberated from a height. A miracle is then an extraordinary event in that it is not brought about by any object exercising its natural powers – e.g., a liberated stone rising in the air – but brought about directly by God. In the modern understanding of nature, there are just events (states of objects) and laws of nature that determine which events follow which other events. There is a law of nature that heavy bodies when liberated fall to the ground. A miracle is then a “violation” of a law of nature by God. We must understand by a law a principle that determines what happens unless there is intervention from outside the natural order, and by a “violation” such an intervention. There are then three problems in identifying a miracle. The first is to determine whether an event of some kind, if it occurred, would be a violation of a law of nature (beyond the natural power of objects to bring about). To know this we must know what are the laws of nature. The second problem is to find out whether such an event did occur on a particular occasion. Our own memories, the testimony of witnesses, and physical traces will be the historical evidence of this, but they can mislead. And the evidence from what happened on other occasions that some law L is a law of nature is evidence supporting the view that on the occasion in question L was operative, and so there was no violation. Hume claimed that in practice there has never been enough historical evidence for a miracle to outweigh the latter kind of counterevidence. Finally, it must be shown that God was the cause of the violation. For that we need grounds from natural theology for believing that there is a God and that this is the sort of occasion on which he is likely to intervene in nature.

misfire: used by Grice in Meaning Revisited. Cf. Austin. “When the utterance is a misfire, the procedure which we purport to invoke is disallowed or is botched: and our act (marrying, etc.) is void or without effect, etc. We speak of our act as a purported act, or perhaps an attempt, or we use such an expression as ‘went through a form of marriaage’ by contrast with ‘married.’ If somebody issues a performative utterance, and the  utterance is classed as a misfire because the procedure  invoked is not accepted , it is presumably persons other  than the speaker who do not accept it (at least if the  speaker is speaking seriously ). What would be an ex-  ample ? Consider ‘I divorce you*, said to a wife by her  husband in a Christian country, and both being Chris-  tians rather than Mohammedans. In this case it might  be said, ‘nevertheless he has not (successfully) divorced  her: we admit only some other verbal or non-verbal pro-  cedure’; or even possibly ‘we (we) do not admit any  procedure at all for effecting divorce — marriage is indis-  soluble’. This may be carried so far that we reject what  may be called a whole code of procedure, e.g. the code of  honour involving duelling: for example, a challenge may  be issued by ‘my seconds will call on you’, which is  equivalent to ‘ I challenge you’, and we merely shrug it off  The general position is exploited in the unhappy story of  Don Quixote.   Of course, it will be evident that it is comparatively  simple if we never admit any ‘such’ procedure at all —  that is, any procedure at all for doing that sort of thing,  or that procedure anyway for doing that particular thing.  But equally possible are the cases where we do sometimes  — in certain circumstances or at certain hands — accept     n n^A/'Q/1n  U UlUVlfU u     plUVWUiV/, ULIL UW 111     T\llt 1 n nrttT at* amaiitvwifnnaati at* af   ULIL 111 ttllj UL1U/1 L/llCUllli3Lail\/^ KJL CIL     other hands. And here we may often be in doubt (as in      28     Horn to do things with Words     the naming example above) whether an infelicity should  be brought into our present class A. i or rather into  A. 2 (or even B. i or B. 2). For example, at a party, you  say, when picking sides, ‘I pick George’: George grunts  ‘I’m not playing.’ Has George been picked? Un-  doubtedly, the situation is an unhappy one. Well, we  may say, you have not picked George, whether because  there is no convention that you can pick people who  aren’t playing or because George in the circumstances is  an inappropriate object for the procedure of picking. Or  on a desert island you may say to me ‘Go and pick up  wood’; and I may say 4 1 don’t take orders from you’ or  ‘you’re not entitled to give me orders’ — I do not take  orders from you when you try to ‘assert your authority’  (which I might fall in with but may not) on a desert  island, as opposed to the case when you are the captain  on a ship and therefore genuinely have authority.

missum: If Grice uses psi-transmission (and emission, when he speaks of ‘pain,’ and the decibels of the emission of a bellow) he also uses transmission, and mission, transmissum, and missum. Grice was out on a mission. Grice uses ‘emissor,’ but then there’s the ‘missor.’ This is in key with modern communication theory as instituted by Shannon. The ‘missor’ ‘sends’ a ‘message’ to a recipient – or missee. But be careful, he may miss it. In any case, it shows that e-missor is a compound of ‘ex-‘ plus ‘missor,’ so that makes sense. It transliterates Grice’s ut-terer (which literally means ‘out-erer’). And then there’s the prolatum, from proferre, which has the professor, as professing that p, that is. As someone said, if H. P. Girce were to present a talk to the Oxford Philosophical Society he would possibly call it “Messaging.” c. 1300, "a communication transmitted via a messenger, a notice sent through some agency," from Old French message "message, news, tidings, embassy" (11c.), from Medieval Latin missaticum, from Latin missus "a sending away, sending, dispatching; a throwing, hurling," noun use of past participle of mittere "to release, let go; send, throw" (see mission). The Latin word is glossed in Old English by ærende. Specific religious sense of "divinely inspired communication via a prophet" (1540s) led to transferred sense of "the broad meaning (of something)," which is attested by 1828. To get the message "understand" is by 1960.

m’naghten: a rule in England’s law defining legal insanity for purposes of creating a defense to criminal liability: legal insanity is any defect of reason, due to disease of the mind, that causes an accused criminal either not to know the nature and quality of his act, or not to know that his act was morally or legally wrong. Adopted in the Edward Drummond-M’Naghten case in England in 1843, the rule harks back to the responsibility test for children, which was whether they were mature enough to know the difference between right and wrong. The rule is alternatively viewed today as being either a test of a human being’s general status as a moral agent or a test of when an admitted moral agent is nonetheless excused because of either factual or moral/legal mistakes. On the first (or status) interpretation of the rule, the insane are exempted from criminal liability because they, like young children, lack the rational agency essential to moral personhood. On the second (or mistake) interpretation of the rule, the insane are exempted from criminal liability because they instantiate the accepted moral excuses of mistake or ignorance. Refs.: H. P. Grice and H. L. A. Hart, ‘Legal rules;’ D. F. Pears, “Motivated irrationality.”

mnemic causation, a type of causation in which, in order to explain the proximate cause of an organism’s behaviour, it is necessary to specify not only the present state of the organism and the present stimuli operating upon it, but also this or that past experience of the organism. The term was introduced by Russell in The Analysis of Mind, and borrowed, but never returned, by Grice for his Lockeian logical construction of personal identity or “I” in terms of an chain of mnemonic temporary states. “Unlike Russell, I distinguish between the mnemic and the mnemonic.”

mode of co-relation: a technical jargon, under ‘mode’ – although Grice uses ‘c’ to abbreviate it, and sometimes speaks of ‘way’ of ‘co-relation’ – but ‘mode’ was his favourite.  Grice is not sure whether ‘mode’ ‘of’ and ‘correlation’ are the appropriate terms. Grice speaks of an associative mode of correlation – vide associatum. He also speaks of a conventional mode of correlation (or is it mode of conventional correlation) – vide non-conventional, and he speaks of an iconic mode of correlation, vide non-iconic. Indeed he speaks once of ‘conventional correlation’ TO THE ASSOCIATED  specific response. So the mode is rather otiose. In the context when he uses ‘conventional correlation’ TO THE ASSOCIATED specific response, he uses ‘way’ rather than mode – Grice wants ‘conventional correlation’ TO THE ASSOCIATED specific RESPONSE to be just one way, or mode. There’s ASSOCIATIVE correlation, and iconic correlation, and ‘etc.’ Strictly, as he puts it, this or that correlation is this or that provision of a way in which the expressum is correlated to a specific response. When symbolizing he uses the informal “correlated in way c with response r’ – having said that ‘c’ stands for ‘mode of correlation.’ But ‘mode sounds too pretentious, hence his retreat to the more flowing ‘way.’

model theory: H. P. Grice, “A conversational model.” Grice: “Since the object of the present exercise, is to provide a bit of theory which will explain, for a certain family of cases, why is it that a particular implicaturum is present, I would suggest that the final test of the adequacy and utility of this model should be: can it be used to construct an explanation of the presence of such an implicaturum, and is it more comprehensive and more economical than any rival? is the no doubt pre-theoretical explanation which one would be prompted to give of such an implicaturum consistent with, or better still a favourable pointer towards the requirements involved in the model? cf. Sidonius: Far otherwise: whoever disputes with you will find those protagonists of heresy, the Stoics, Cynics, and Peripatetics, shattered with their own arms and their own engines; for their heathen followers, if they resist the doctrine and spirit of Christianity, will, under your teaching, be caught in their own familiar entanglements, and fall headlong into their own toils; the barbed syllogism of your arguments will hook the glib tongues of the casuists, and it is you who will tie up their slippery questions in categorical clews, after the manner of a clever physician, who, when compelled by reasoned thought, prepares antidotes for poison even from a serpent.qvin potivs experietvr qvisqve conflixerit stoicos cynicos peripateticos hæresiarchas propriis armis propriis qvoqve concvti machinamentis nam sectatores eorum Christiano dogmati ac sensvi si repvgnaverint mox te magistro ligati vernaculis implicaturis in retia sua præcipites implagabvntur syllogismis tuæ propositionis vncatis volvbilem tergiversantvm lingvam inhamantibvs dum spiris categoricis lubricas qvæstiones tv potivs innodas acrivm more medicorvm qui remedivm contra venena cum ratio compellit et de serpente conficivnt.” Grice: “Since the object of the present exercise, is to provide a bit of theory which will explain, for a certain family of cases, why is it that a particular conversational implicaturum is present, I would suggest that the final tess  of the adequacy and utility of this MODEL should be various. First: can the model be used to construct an explanation (argumentum) of the presence of this or that conversational implicaturum? Second, is the model it more comprehensive than any rival in providing this explanation? Third, is the model more economical than any rival in providing this explanation? Fourth, is the no doubt pre-theoretical (antecedent) explanation which one would be prompted to give of such a conversational implicaturum consistent with the requirements involved in the model. Fifth: is the no doubt pre-threoretical (antecedent) explanation which one would be prompted to give of such a conversational implciaturum  better still, a favourable POINTER towards the requirements involved in the model? Cf. Sidonius: Far otherwise: whoever disputes with you will find those protagonists of heresy, the Stoics, Cynics, and Peripatetics, shattered with their own arms and their own engines; for their heathen followers, if they resist the doctrine and spirit of Christianity, will, under your teaching, be caught in their own familiar entanglements, and fall headlong into their own toils; the barbed syllogism of your arguments will hook the glib tongues of the casuists, and it is you who will tie up their slippery questions in categorical clews, after the manner of a clever physician, who, when compelled by reasoned thought, prepares antidotes for poison even from a serpent -- qvin potivs experietvr qvisqve conflixerit stoicos cynicos peripateticos hæresiarchas propriis armis propriis qvoqve concvti machinamentis nam sectatores eorum Christiano dogmati ac sensvi si repvgnaverint mox te magistro ligati vernacvlis implicatvris in retia sva præcipites implagabvntur syllogismis tuæ propositionis vncatis volvbilem tergiversantvm lingvam inhamantibvs dum spiris categoricis lvbricas qvæstiones tv potivs innodas acrivm more medicorvm qui remedivm contra venena cvm ratio compellit et de serpente conficivnt. qvin potivs experietvr qvisqve conflixerit stoicos cynicos peripateticos hæresiarchas propriis armis propriis qvoqve concvti machinamentis nam sectatores eorum Christiano dogmati ac sensvi si repvgnaverint mox te magistro ligati vernacvlis IMPILICATVRIS in retia sva præcipites implagabvntur syllogismis tuæ propositionis vncatis volvbilem tergiversantvm lingvam inhamantibvs dum spiris categoricis lubricas qvæstiones tv potivs innodas acrivm more medicorvm qui remedivm contra venena cvm ratio compellit et de serpente conficivnt. So Grice has the phenomenon: the conversational implcaturum – the qualifying adjective is crucial, since surely he is not interested in non-conventional NON-conversational implicatura derived from moral maxims! --. And then he needs a MODEL – that of the principle or postulate of conversational benevolence. It fits the various requirements. First: the model can be used to construct an explanation (argumentum) of the presence of this or that conversational implicaturum. Second, REQUIREMENT OF PHILOSOPHICAL GENERALITY --  the model is more comprehensive than any rival. Third, the OCCAM requirement: the model is more ECONOMICAL than any rival – in what sense? – “in providing this explanation” of this or that conversational implicaturum. Fourth, the J. L. Austin requirement, this or that requirement involved in the model is SURELY consistent with the no doubt pre-theoretical antecedent explanation (argumentum) that one would be prompted to give. Fifth, the second J. L. Austin requirement: towards this or that requirement involved in the model the no-doubt pre-theoretical (antecedent) explanation (argument) that one would be prompted to give is, better still, a favourable pointer. Grice’s oversuse of ‘model’ is due to Max Black, who understands model theory as a branch of philosophical semantics that deals with the connection between a language and its interpretations or structures. Basic to it is the characterization of the conditions under which a sentence is true in structure. It is confusing that the term ‘model’ itself is used slightly differently: a model for a sentence is a structure for the language of the sentence in which it is true. Model theory was originally developed for explicitly constructed, formal languages, with the purpose of studying foundational questions of mathematics, but was later applied to the semantical analysis of empirical theories, a development initiated by the Dutch philosopher Evert Beth, and of natural languages, as in Montague grammar. More recently, in situation theory, we find a theory of semantics in which not the concept of truth in a structure, but that of information carried by a statement about a situation, is central. The term ‘model theory’ came into use in the 0s, with the work on first-order model theory by Tarski, but some of the most central results of the field date from before that time. The history of the field is complicated by the fact that in the 0s and 0s, when the first model-theoretic findings were obtained, the separation between first-order logic and its extensions was not yet completed. Thus, in 5, there appeared an article by Leopold Löwenheim, containing the first version of what is now called the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem. Löwenheim proved that every satisfiable sentence has a countable model, but he did not yet work in firstorder logic as we now understand it. One of the first who did so was the Norwegian logician Thoralf Skolem, who showed in 0 that a set of first-order sentences that has a model, has a countable model, one form of the LöwenheimSkolem theorem. Skolem argued that logic was first-order logic and that first-order logic was the proper basis for metamathematical investigations, fully accepting the relativity of set-theoretic notions in first-order logic. Within philosophy this thesis is still dominant, but in the end it has not prevailed in mathematical logic. In 0 Kurt Gödel solved an open problem of Hilbert-Ackermann and proved a completeness theorem for first-order logic. This immediately led to another important model-theoretic result, the compactness theorem: if every finite subset of a set of sentences has a model then the set has a model. A good source for information about the model theory of first-order logic, or classical model theory, is still Model Theory by C. C. Chang and H. J. Keisler 3. When the separation between first-order logic and stronger logics had been completed and the model theory of first-order logic had become a mature field, logicians undertook in the late 0s the study of extended model theory, the model theory of extensions of first-order logic: first of cardinality quantifiers, later of infinitary languages and of fragments of second-order logic. With so many examples of logics around  where sometimes classical theorems did generalize, sometimes not  Per Lindström showed in 9 what sets first-order logic apart from its extensions: it is the strongest logic that is both compact and satisfies the LöwenheimSkolem theorem. This work has been the beginning of a study of the relations between various properties logics may possess, the so-called abstract model. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The postulate of conversational co-operation,” Oxford.

modus: Grice was an expert on mode. There is one mode too many. If Grice found ‘senses’ obsolete (“Sense are not to be multiplied beyond necessity”), he was always ready to welcome a new mode – e. g. the quessertive --. or mode. ἔγκλισις , enclisis, mood of a verb, D.H.Comp.6, D.T.638.7, A.D. Synt.248.14, etc.Many times, under ‘mode,’ Grice describes what others call ‘aspect.’ Surely ‘tense’ did not affect him much, except when it concerned “=”. But when it came to modes, he included ‘aspect,’ so there’s the optative, the imperative, the indicative, the informational, and then the future intentional and the future indicative, and the subjunctive, and the way they interact with the praesens, praeteritum and futurum, and wih the axis of what Aristotle called ‘teleios’ and ‘ateleios,’ indefinite and definite, or ‘perfectum, and ‘imperfectum, ‘but better ‘definitum’ and ‘indefinitum.’ Grice uses psi-asrisk, to be read asterisk-sub-psi. He is not concerned with specficics. All the specifics the philosopher can take or rather ‘assume’ as ‘given.’ The category of mode translates ‘tropos,’ modus. Kant wrongly assumed it was Modalitat, which irritated Grice so much that he echoed Kant as saying ‘manner’! Grice is a modista. He sometimes uses ‘modus,’ after Abbott. The earliest record is of course “Meaning.” After elucidating what he calls ‘informative cases,’ he moves to ‘imperative’ ones. Grice agreed with Thomas Urquhart that English needed a few more moods! Grice’s seven modes.Thirteenthly, In lieu of six moods which other languages have at most, this one injoyeth seven in its conjugable words. Ayer had said that non-indicative utterances are hardly significant. Grice had been freely using the very English not Latinate ‘mood’ until Moravcsik, of all people, corrects him: What you mean ain’t a mood. I shall call it mode just to please you, J. M. E. The sergeant is to muster the men at dawn is a perfect imperative. They shall not pass is a perfect intentional. A version of this essay was presented in a conference whose proceedings were published, except for Grices essay, due to technical complications, viz. his idiosyncratic use of idiosyncratic symbology! By mode Grice means indicative or imperative. Following Davidson, Grice attaches probability to the indicative, via the doxastic, and desirability to the indicative, via the buletic-boulomaic.  He also allows for mixed utterances. Probability is qualified with a suboperator indicating a degree d; ditto for desirability, degree d. In some of the drafts, Grice kept using mode until Moravsik suggested to him that mode was a better choice, seeing that Grices modality had little to do with what other authors were referring to as mood. Probability, desirability, and modality, modality, desirability, and probability; modality, probability, desirability. He would use mode operator. Modality is the more correct term, for things like should, ought, and must, in that order. One sense. The doxastic modals are correlated to probability. The buletic or boulomaic modals are correlated to desirability. There is probability to a degree d. But there is also desirability to a degree d.  They both combine in Grices attempt to show how Kants categorical imperative reduces to the hypothetical or suppositional. Kant uses modality in a way that Grice disfavours, preferring modus. Grice is aware of the use by Kant of modality qua category in the reduction by Kant to four of the original ten categories in Aristotle). The Jeffrey-style entitled Probability, desirability, and mode operators finds Grice at his formal-dress best. It predates the Kant lectures and it got into so much detail that Grice had to leave it at that. So abstract it hurts. Going further than Davidson, Grice argues that structures expressing probability and desirability are not merely analogous. They can both be replaced by more complex structures containing a common element. Generalising over attitudes using the symbol ψ, which he had used before, repr. WoW:v, Grice proposes G ψ that p. Further, Grice uses i as a dummy for sub-divisions of psychological attitudes. Grice uses Op supra i sub α, read: operation supra i sub alpha, as Grice was fastidious enough to provide reading versions for these, and where α is a dummy taking the place of either A or B, i. e. Davidsons prima facie or desirably, and probably. In all this, Grice keeps using the primitive !, where a more detailed symbolism would have it correspond exactly to Freges composite turnstile (horizontal stroke of thought and vertical stroke of assertoric force, Urteilstrich) that Grice of course also uses, and for which it is proposed, then: !─p. There are generalising movements here but also merely specificatory ones. α is not generalised. α is a dummy to serve as a blanket for this or that specifications. On the other hand, ψ is indeed generalised. As for i, is it generalising or specificatory? i is a dummy for specifications, so it is not really generalising. But Grice generalises over specifications. Grice wants to find buletic, boulomaic or volitive as he prefers when he does not prefer the Greek root for both his protreptic and exhibitive versions (operator supra exhibitive, autophoric, and operator supra protreptic, or hetero-phoric). Note that Grice (WoW:110) uses the asterisk * as a dummy for either assertoric, i.e., Freges turnstile, and non-assertoric, the !─ the imperative turnstile, if you wish. The operators A are not mode operators; they are such that they represent some degree (d) or measure of acceptability or justification. Grice prefers acceptability because it connects with accepting that which is a psychological, souly attitude, if a general one. Thus, Grice wants to have It is desirable that p and It is believable that p as understood, each, by the concatenation of three elements. The first element is the A-type operator. The second element is the protreptic-type operator. The third element is the phrastic, root, content, or proposition itself. It is desirable that p and It is believable that p share the utterer-oriented-type operator and the neustic or proposition. They only differ at the protreptic-type operator (buletic/volitive/boulomaic or judicative/doxastic). Grice uses + for concatenation, but it is best to use ^, just to echo who knows who. Grice speaks in that mimeo (which he delivers in Texas, and is known as Grices Performadillo talk ‒ Armadillo + Performative) of various things. Grice speaks, transparently enough, of acceptance: V-acceptance and J-acceptance. V not for Victory but for volitional, and J for judicative. The fact that both end with -acceptance would accept you to believe that both are forms of acceptance. Grice irritatingly uses 1 to mean the doxastic, and 2 to mean the bulematic. At Princeton in Method, he defines the doxastic in terms of the buletic and cares to do otherwise, i. e. define the buletic in terms of the doxastic. So whenever he wrote buletic read doxastic, and vice versa. One may omits this arithmetic when reporting on Grices use. Grice uses two further numerals, though: 3 and 4. These, one may decipher – one finds oneself as an archeologist in Tutankamons burial ground, as this or that relexive attitude. Thus, 3, i. e. ψ3, where we need the general operator ψ, not just specificatory dummy, but the idea that we accept something simpliciter. ψ3 stands for the attitude of buletically accepting an or utterance: doxastically accepting that p or doxastically accepting that ~p. Why we should be concerned with ~p is something to consider.  G wants to decide whether to believe p or not. I find that very Griceian. Suppose I am told that there is a volcano in Iceland. Why would I not want to believe it? It seems that one may want to decide whether to believe p or not when p involves a tacit appeal to value. But, as Grice notes, even when it does not involve value, Grice still needs trust and volition to reign supreme. On the other hand, theres 4, as attached to an attitude, ψ4. This stands for an attitude of buletically accepting an or utterance: buletically accepting that p, or G buletically accepting that ~p, i. e. G wants to decide whether to will, now that p or not. This indeed is crucial, since, for Grice, morality, as with Kantotle, does cash in desire, the buletic. Grice smokes. He wills to smoke. But does he will to will to smoke? Possibly yes. Does he will to will to will to smoke? Regardless of what Grice wills, one may claim this holds for a serious imperatives (not Thou shalt not reek, but Thou shalt not kill, say) or for any p if you must (because if you know that p causes cancer (p stands for a proposition involving cigarette) you should know you are killing yourself. But then time also kills, so what gives? So I would submit that, for Kant, the categoric imperative is one which allows for an indefinite chain, not of chain-smokers, but of good-willers. If, for some p, we find that at some stage, the P does not will that he wills that he wills that he wills that, p can not be universalisable. This is proposed in an essay referred to in The Philosophers Index but Marlboro Cigarettes took no notice. One may go on to note Grices obsession on make believe. If I say, I utter expression e because the utterer wants his addressee to believe that the utterer believes that p, there is utterer and addresse, i. e. there are two people here  ‒ or any soul-endowed creature  ‒ for Grices squarrel means things to Grice. It even implicates. It miaows to me while I was in bed. He utters miaow. He means that he is hungry, he means (via implicaturum) that he wants a nut (as provided by me). On another occasion he miaowes explicating, The door is closed, and implicating Open it, idiot. On the other hand, an Andy-Capps cartoon read: When budgies get sarcastic Wild-life programmes are repeating One may note that one can want some other person to hold an attitude. Grice uses U or G1 for utterer and A or G2 for addressee. These are merely roles. The important formalism is indeed G1 and G2. G1 is a Griceish utterer-person; G2 is the other person, G1s addressee. Grice dislikes a menage a trois, apparently, for he seldom symbolises a third party, G3. So, G ψ-3-A that p is 1 just in case G ψ2(G ψ1 that p) or G ψ1 that ~p is 1. And here the utterers addressee, G2 features: G1 ψ³ protreptically that p is 1 just in case G buletically accepts ψ² (G buletically accepts ψ² (G doxastically accepts ψ1 that p, or G doxastically accepts ψ1 that ~p))) is 1. Grice seems to be happy with having reached four sets of operators, corresponding to four sets of propositional attitudes, and for which Grice provides the paraphrases. The first set is the doxastic proper. It is what Grice has as doxastic,and which is, strictly, either indicative, of the utterers doxastic, exhibitive state, as it were, or properly informative, if addressed to the addressee A, which is different from U himself, for surely one rarely informs oneself. The second is the buletic proper. What Grice dubs volitive, but sometimes he prefers the Grecian root. This is again either self- or utterer-addressed, or utterer-oriented, or auto-phoric, and it is intentional, or it is other-addressed, or addressee-addressed, or addressee- oriented, or hetero-phoric, and it is imperative, for surely one may not always say to oneself, Dont smoke, idiot!. The third is the doxastic-interrogative, or doxastic-erotetic. One may expand on ? here is minimal compared to the vagaries of what I called the !─ (non-doxastic or buletic turnstile), and which may be symbolised by ?─p, where ?─ stands for the erotetic turnstile. Geachs and Althams erotetic somehow Grice ignores, as he more often uses the Latinate interrogative. Lewis and Short have “interrŏgātĭo,” which they render as “a questioning, inquiry, examination, interrogation;” “sententia per interrogationem, Quint. 8, 5, 5; instare interrogation; testium; insidiosa; litteris inclusæ; verbis obligatio fit ex interrogatione et responsione; as rhet. fig., Quint. 9, 2, 15; 9, 3, 98. B. A syllogism: recte genus hoc interrogationis ignavum ac iners nominatum est, Cic. Fat. 13; Sen. Ep. 87 med. Surely more people know what interrogative means what erotetic means, he would not say ‒ but he would. This attitude comes again in two varieties: self-addressed or utterer-oriented, reflective (Should I go?) or again, addresee-addressed, or addressee-oriented, imperative, as in Should you go?, with a strong hint that the utterer is expecting is addressee to make up his mind in the proceeding, not just inform the utterer. Last but not least, there is the fourth kind, the buletic-cum-erotetic. Here again, there is one varietiy which is reflective, autophoric, as Grice prefers, utterer-addressed, or utterer-oriented, or inquisitive (for which Ill think of a Greek pantomime), or addressee-addressed, or addressee-oriented. Grice regrets that Greek (and Latin, of which he had less ‒ cfr. Shakespeare who had none) fares better in this respect the Oxonian that would please Austen, if not Austin, or Maucalay, and certainly not Urquhart -- his language has twelve parts of speech: each declinable in eleven cases, four numbers, eleven genders (including god, goddess, man, woman, animal, etc.); and conjugable in eleven tenses, seven moods, and four voices.These vocal mannerisms will result in the production of some pretty barbarous English sentences; but we must remember that what I shall be trying to do, in uttering such sentences, will be to represent supposedly underlying structure; if that is ones aim, one can hardly expect that ones speech-forms will be such as to excite the approval of, let us say, Jane Austen or Lord Macaulay. Cf. the quessertive, or quessertion, possibly iterable, that Grice cherished. But then you cant have everything. Where would you put it? Grice: The modal implicaturum. Grice sees two different, though connected questions about mode. First, there is the obvious demand for a characterisation, or partial characterisation, of this or that mode as it emerges in this or that conversational move, which is plausible to regard as modes primary habitat) both at the level of the explicatum or the implicaturum, for surely an indicative conversational move may be the vehicle of an imperatival implicaturum. A second, question is how, and to what extent, the representation of mode (Hares neustic) which is suitable for application to this or that conversational move may be legitimately exported into philosophical psychology, or rather, may be grounded on questions of philosophical psychology, matters of this or that psychological state, stance, or attitude (notably desire and belief, and their species). We need to consider the second question, the philosophico- psychological question, since, if the general rationality operator is to read as something like acceptability, as in U accepts, or A accepts, the appearance of this or that mode within its scope of accepting is proper only if it may properly occur within the scope of a generic psychological verb I accept that . Lewis and Short have “accepto,” “v. freq. a. accipio,” which Short and Lewis render as “to take, receive, accept,” “argentum,” Plaut. Ps. 2, 2, 32; so Quint. 12, 7, 9; Curt. 4, 6, 5; Dig. 34, 1, 9: “jugum,” to submit to, Sil. Ital. 7, 41. But in Plin. 36, 25, 64, the correct read. is coeptavere; v. Sillig. a. h. l. The easiest way Grice finds to expound his ideas on the first question is by reference to a schematic table or diagram (Some have complained that I seldom use a board, but I will today. Grice at this point reiterates his temporary contempt for the use/mention distinction, which which Strawson is obsessed. Perhaps Grices contempt is due to Strawsons obsession. Grices exposition would make the hair stand on end in the soul of a person especially sensitive in this area. And Im talking to you, Sir Peter! (He is on the second row). But Grices guess is that the only historical philosophical mistake properly attributable to use/mention confusion is Russells argument against Frege in On denoting, and that there is virtually always an acceptable way of eliminating disregard of the use-mention distinction in a particular case, though the substitutes are usually lengthy, obscure, and tedious. Grice makes three initial assumptions. He avails himself of two species of acceptance, Namesly, volitive acceptance and judicative acceptance, which he, on occasion, calls respectively willing that p and willing that p.  These are to be thought of as technical or semi-technical, theoretical or semi-theoretical, though each is a state which approximates to what we vulgarly call thinking that p and wanting that p, especially in the way in which we can speak of a beast such as a little squarrel as thinking or wanting something  ‒ a nut, poor darling little thing. Grice here treats each will and judge (and accept) as a primitive. The proper interpretation would be determined by the role of each in a folk-psychological theory (or sequence of folk-psychological theories), of the type the Wilde reader in mental philosophy favours at Oxford, designed to account for the behaviours of members of the animal kingdom, at different levels of psychological complexity (some classes of creatures being more complex than others, of course). As Grice suggests in Us meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning, at least at the point at which (Schema Of Procedure-Specifiers For Mood-Operators) in ones syntactico-semantical theory of Pirotese or Griceish, one is introducing this or that mode (and possibly earlier), the proper form to use is a specifier for this or that resultant procedure. Such a specifier is of the general form, For the utterer U to utter x if C, where the blank is replaced by the appropriate condition. Since in the preceding scheme x represents an utterance or expression, and not a sentence or open sentence, there is no guarantee that this or that actual sentence in Pirotese or Griceish contains a perspicuous and unambiguous modal representation. A sentence may correspond to more than one modal structure. The sentence is structurally ambiguous (multiplex in meaning  ‒ under the proviso that senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity) and will have more than one reading, or parsing, as every schoolboy at Clifton knows when translating viva voce from Greek or Latin, as the case might be. The general form of a procedure-specifier for a modal operator involves a main clause and an antecedent clause, which follows if. In the schematic representation of the main clause, U represents an utterer, A his addressee, p the radix or neustic; and Opi represents that operator whose number is i (1, 2, 3, or 4), e.g g., Op3A represents Operator 3A, which, since ?⊢ appears in the Operator column for 3A) would be ?A ⊢ p. This reminds one of Grandys quessertions, for he did think they were iterable (possibly)). The antecedent clause consists of a sequence whose elements are a preamble, as it were, or preface, or prefix, a supplement to a differential (which is present only in a B-type, or addressee-oriented case), a differential, and a radix. The preamble, which is always present, is invariant, and reads: The U U wills (that) A A judges (that) U  (For surely meaning is a species of intending is a species of willing that, alla Prichard, Whites professor, Corpus). The supplement, if present, is also invariant. And the idea behind its varying presence or absence is connected, in the first instance, with the volitive mode. The difference between an ordinary expression of intention  ‒ such as I shall not fail, or They shall not pass  ‒  and an ordinary imperative (Like Be a little kinder to him) is accommodated by treating each as a sub-mode of the volitive mode, relates to willing that p) In the intentional case (I shall not fail), the utterer U is concerned to reveal to his addressee A that he (the utterer U) wills that p. In the imperative case (They shall not pass), the utterer U is concerned to reveal to his addressee A that the utterer U wills that the addresee A will that p.  In each case, of course, it is to be presumed that willing that p will have its standard outcome, viz., the actualization, or realisation, or direction of fit, of the radix (from expression to world, downwards). There is a corresponding distinction between two uses of an indicative. The utterer U may be declaring or affirming that p, in an exhibitive way, with the primary intention to get his addressee A to judge that the utterer judges that p. Or the U is telling (in a protreptic way) ones addressee that p, that is to say, hoping to get his addressee to judge that p. In the case of an indicative, unlike that of a volitive, there is no explicit pair of devices which would ordinarily be thought of as sub-mode marker. The recognition of the sub-mode is implicated, and comes from context, from the vocative use of the Names of the addressee, from the presence of a speech-act verb, or from a sentence-adverbial phrase (like for your information, so that you know, etc.). But Grice has already, in his initial assumptions, allowed for such a situation. The exhibitive-protreptic distinction or autophoric-heterophoric distinction, seems to Grice to be also discernible in the interrogative mode (?). Each differentials is associated with, and serve to distinguish, each of the two basic modes (volitive or judicative) and, apart from one detail in the case of the interrogative mode, is invariant between autophoric-exhibitive) and heterophoric-protreptic sub-modes of any of the two basic modes. They are merely unsupplemented or supplemented, the former for an exhibitive sub-mode and the latter for a protreptic sub-mode. The radix needs (one hopes) no further explanation, except that it might be useful to bear in mind that Grice does not stipulated that the radix for an intentional (buletic exhibitive utterer-based) incorporate a reference to the utterer, or be in the first person, nor that the radix for an imperative (buletic protreptic addressee-based) incorporate a reference of the addresee, and be in the second person. They shall not pass is a legitimate intentional, as is You shall not get away with it; and The sergeant is to muster the men at dawn, as uttered said by the captain to the lieutenant) is a perfectly good imperative. Grice gives in full the two specifiers derived from the schema. U to utter to A autophoric-exhibitive ⊢ p if U wills that A judges that U judges p. Again, U to utter to A ! heterophoric-protreptic p if U wills that A A judges that U wills that A wills that p. Since, of the states denoted by each differential, only willing that p and judging that p are strictly cases of accepting that p, and Grices ultimate purpose of his introducing this characterization of mode is to reach a general account of expressions which are to be conjoined, according to his proposal, with an acceptability operator, the first two numbered rows of the figure are (at most) what he has a direct use for. But since it is of some importance to Grice that his treatment of mode should be (and should be thought to be) on the right lines, he adds a partial account of the interrogative mode. There are two varieties of interrogatives, a yes/no interrogatives (e. g. Is his face clean? Is the king of France bald? Is virtue a fire-shovel?) and x-interrogatives, on which Grice qua philosopher was particularly interested, v. his The that and the why.  (Who killed Cock Robin?, Where has my beloved gone?, How did he fix it?). The specifiers derivable from the schema provide only for yes/no interrogatives, though the figure could be quite easily amended so as to yield a restricted but very large class of x-interrogatives. Grice indicates how this could be done. The distinction between a buletic and a doxastic interrogative corresponds with the difference between a case in which the utterer U indicates that he is, in one way or another, concerned to obtain information (Is he at home?), and a case in which the utterer U indicates that he is concerned to settle a problem about what he is to do ‒ Am I to leave the door open?, Shall I go on reading? or, with an heterophoric Subjects, Is the prisoner to be released? This difference is fairly well represented in grammar, and much better represented in the grammars of some other languages. The hetero-phoric-cum-protreptic/auto-phoric-cum- exhibitive difference may not marked at all in this or that grammar, but it should be marked in Pirotese. This or that sub-mode is, however, often quite easily detectable. There is usually a recognizable difference between a case in which the utterer A says, musingly or reflectively, Is he to be trusted?  ‒ a case in which the utterer might say that he is just wondering  ‒ and a case in which he utters a token of the same sentence as an enquiry. Similarly, one can usually tell whether an utterer A who utters Shall I accept the invitation?  is just trying to make up his mind, or is trying to get advice or instruction from his addressee. The employment of the variable α needs to be explained. Grice borrows a little from an obscure branch of logic, once (but maybe no longer) practised, called, Grice thinks, proto-thetic ‒ Why? Because it deals with this or that first principle or axiom, or thesis), the main rite in which is to quantify over, or through, this or that connective. α is to have as its two substituents positively and negatively, which may modify either will or judge, negatively willing or negatively judging that p is judging or willing that ~p. The quantifier (∃1α) . . . has to be treated substitutionally. If, for example, I ask someone whether John killed Cock Robin (protreptic case), I do not want the addressee merely to will that I have a particular logical quality in mind which I believe to apply. I want the addressee to have one of the Qualities in mind which he wants me to believe to apply. To meet this demand, supplementation must drag back the quantifier. To extend the schema so as to provide specifiers for a single x-interrogative (i. e., a question like What did the butler see? rather than a question like Who went where with whom at 4 oclock yesterday afternoon?), we need just a little extra apparatus. We need to be able to superscribe a W in each interrogative operator e.g., together with the proviso that a radix which follows a superscribed operator must be an open radix, which contains one or more occurrences of just one free variable. And we need a chameleon variable λ, to occur only in this or that quantifier. (∃λ).Fx is to be regarded as a way of writing (∃x)Fx. (∃λ)Fy is a way of writing (∃y)Fy. To provide a specifier for a x-superscribed operator, we simply delete the appearances of α in the specifier for the corresponding un-superscribed operator, inserting instead the quantifier (∃1λ) () at the position previously occupied by (∃1α) (). E.g. the specifiers for Who killed Cock Robin?, used as an enquiry, would be: U to utter to A  killed Cock Robin if U wills A to judge U to will that (∃1λ) (A should will that U judges (x killed Cock Robin)); in which (∃1λ) takes on the shape (∃1x) since x is the free variable within its scope. Grice compares his buletic-doxastic distinction to prohairesis/doxa distinction by Aristotle in Ethica Nichomachea. Perhaps his simplest formalisation is via subscripts: I will-b but will-d not. Refs.: The main references are given above under ‘desirability.’ The most systematic treatment is the excursus in “Aspects,” Clarendon. BANC.

modified Occam’s razor: Grice was obsessed with ‘sense,’ and thought Oxonian philosohpers were multiplying it otiosely – notably L. J. Cohen (“The diversity of meaning”). The original razor is what Grice would have as ‘ontological,’ to which he opposes with in his ‘ontological marxism’. Entities should not be multiplied beyond the necessity of needing them as honest working entities. He keeps open house provided they come in help with the work. This restriction explains what Grice means by ‘necessity’ in the third lecture – a second sense does not do any work. The implicaturum does.  Grice loved a razor, and being into analogy and focal meaning, if he HAD to have semantic multiplicity, for the case of ‘is,’ (being) or ‘good,’ it had to be a UNIFIED semantic multiplicity, as displayed by paronymy. The essay had circulated since the Harvard days, and it was also repr. in Pragmatics, ed. Cole for Academic Press. Personally, I prefer dialectica.  ‒ Grice. This is the third James lecture at Harvard. It is particularly useful for Grices introduction of his razor, M. O. R., or Modified Occams Razor, jocularly expressed by Grice as: Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. An Englishing of the Ockhams Latinate, Entia non sunt multiplicanda præter necessitatem. But what do we mean sense. Surely Occam was right with his Entia non sunt multiplicanda præter necessitatem. We need to translate that alla linguistic turn. Grice jokes: Senses are not be multiplied beyond necessity. He also considers irony, stress (supra-segmental fourth-articulatory phonology), and truth, which the Grice Papers have under a special f. in the s. V . Three topics where the implicaturum helps. He is a scoundrel may well be the implicaturum of He is a fine friend. But cf. the pretense theory of irony. Grice, being a classicist, loved the etymological connection. With Stress, he was concerned with anti-Gettier uses of emphatic know: I KNOW. (Implicaturum: I do have conclusive evidence). Truth (or  is true) sprang from the attention by Grice to that infamous Bristol symposium between Austin and Strawson. Cf. Moores paradox. Grice wants to defend correspondence theory of Austin against the performative approach of Strawson. If  is true implicates someone previously affirmed this, that does not mean a ditto implicaturum is part of the entailment of a  is true utterance, further notes on logic and conversation, in Cole, repr. in a revised form, Modified Occams Razor, irony, stress, truth. The preferred citation should be the Harvard. This is originally the third James lecture, in a revised form.In that lecture, Grice introduced the M. O. R., or Modified Occams Razor. Senses are not be multiplied beyond necessity. The point is that entailment-cum-implicaturum does the job that multiplied senses should not do! The Grice Papers contains in a different f. the concluding section for that lecture, on irony, stress, and truth. Grice went back to the Modified Occams razor, but was never able to formalise it! It is, as he concedes, almost a vacuous methodological thingy! It is interesting that the way he defines the alethic value of true alrady cites satisfactory. I shall use, to Names such a property, not true but factually satisfactory. Grices sympathies dont lie with Strawsons Ramsey-based redundance theory of truth, but rather with Tarskis theory of correspondence. He goes on to claim his trust in the feasibility of such a theory. It is, indeed, possible to construct a theory which treats truth as (primarily) a property, not true but factually satisfactory. One may see that point above as merely verbal and not involving any serious threat. Lets also assume that it will be a consequence, or theorem, of such a theory that there will be a class C of utterances (utterances of affirmative Subjects-predicate sentences [such as snow is white or the cat is on the mat of the dog is hairy-coated such that each member of C designates or refers to some item and indicates or predicates some class (these verbs to be explained within the theory), and is factually satisfactory if the item belongs to the class. Let us also assume that there can be a method of introducing a form of expression, it is true that /it is buletic that  and linking it with the notion of factually or alethic or doxastic satisfactory, a consequence of which will be that to say it is true that Smith is happy will be equivalent to saying that any utterance of class C which designates Smith and indicates the class of happy people is factually satisfactory (that is, any utterance which assigns Smith to the class of happy people is factually satisfactory. Mutatis mutandis for Let Smith be happy, and buletic satisfactoriness. The move is Tarskian. TBy stress, Grice means suprasegmental phonology, but he was too much of a philosopher to let that jargon affect him! Refs.: The locus classicus, if that does not sound too pretentious, is Essay 3 in WoW, but there are references elsewhere, such as in “Meaning Revisited,” and under ‘semantics.’ The only one who took up Grice’s challenge at Oxford was L. J. Cohen, “Grice on the particles of natural language,” which got a great response by Oxonian R. C. S. Walker (citing D. Bostock, a tutee of Grice), to which Cohen again responded “Can the conversationalist hypothesis be defended.” Cohen clearly centres his criticism on the razor. He had an early essay, citing Grice, on the DIVERSITY of meaning. Cohen opposes Grice’s conversationalist hypothesis to his own ‘semantic hypothesis’ (“Multiply senses all you want.”). T. D. Bontly explores the topic of Grice’s MOR. “Ancestors of this essay were presented at meetings of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (Edmonton, Alberta), of the the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (San Francisco, CA) and at the University of Connecticut. I am indebted to all three groups and particularly to the commentators D. Sanford (at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology) and M. Reimer (at the APA). Thanks also to the following for helpful comments or discussion (inclusive): F. Adams, A. Ariew, P. Bloom, M. Devitt, B. Enc, C. Gaulker, M. Lynch, R. Millikan, J. Pust, E. Sober, R. C. Stalnaker, D. W. Stampe, and S. Wheeler.” Bontly writes, more or less (I have paraphrased him a little, with good intentions, always!) “Some philosophers have appealed to a principle which H. P. Grice, in his third William James lecture, dubs Modified Occam’s Razor (henceforth, “M. O. R.”): “Senses – rather than ‘entities,’ as the inceptor from Ockham more boringly has it -- are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’.” What is ‘necessity’? Bontly: “Superficially, Grice’s “M. O. R.” seems a routine application of Ockham’s principle of parsimony: ‘entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Now, parsimony arguments, though common in science, are notoriously problematic, and their use by Grice faces one objection or two. Grice’s “M. O. R.” makes considerably more sense in light of certain assumptions about the psychological processes involved in language development, learning, and acquisition, and it describes recent *empirical*, if not philosophical or conceptual, of the type Grice seems mainly interested in -- findings that bear these assumptions out. [My] resulting account solves several difficulties that otherwise confront Grice’s “M. O. R.”, and it draws attention to problematic assumptions involved in using parsimony to argue for pragmatic accounts of the type of phenomena ‘ordinary-language’ philosophers were interested in. In more general terms, when an expression E has two or more uses – U1 and U2, say -- enabling its users to express two or more different meanings – M1 and M2, say -- one is tempted to assume that E is semantically (i.e. lexically) ambiguous, or polysemous, i.e., that some convention, constituting the language L, assign E these two meanings M1 and M2 corresponding to its two uses U1 and U2. One hears, for instance, that ‘or’ is ambiguous (polysemous) between a weak (inclusive) (‘p v q’) and a strong (exclusive) sense, ‘p w q.’ Grice actually feels that speaking of the meaning or sense of ‘or’ sounds harsh (“Like if I were asked what the meaning of ‘to’ is!”). But in one note from a seminar from Strawson he writes: “Jones is between Smith and Williams.” “I wouldn’t say that ‘between’ is ambiguous, even if we interpret the sentence in a physical sense, or in an ordering of merit, say.” Bontly: “Used exclusively, an utterance of ‘p or q’ (p v q) entails that ‘p’ and ‘q’ are NOT both true. Used inclusively, it does not. Still, ambiguity is not the only possible explanation.” (This reminds me of Atlas, “Philosophy WITHOUT ambiguity!” – ambitious title!). The phenomenon can also be approached pragmatically, from within the framework of a general theory conversation alla Grice. One could, e. g., first, maintain that ‘p or q’ is unambiguously monosemous inclusive and, second, apply Grice’s idea of an ‘implicaturum’ to explain the exclusive.” I actually traced this, and found that O. P. Wood in an odd review of a logic textbook (by Faris) in “Mind,” in the 1950s, makes the point about the inclusive-exclusive distinction, pre-Griceianly! Grice seems more interested, as you later consider, the implicaturum: “Utterer U has non-truth-functional grounds for uttering ‘p or q. Not really the ‘inclusive-exclusive’ distinction. Jennings deals with this in “The genealogy of disjunction,” and elsewhere, and indeed notes that ‘or’ may be a dead metaphor from ‘another.’  Bontly goes on: “On any such account, ‘p or q’ would have two uses U1 and U2 and two standard interpretations, I1 and I2, but NEVER two ‘conventional’ meanings,” M1 and M2 Or take ‘and’ (p.q) which (when used as a sentential connective) ordinarily stands for truth-functional conjunction (as in 1a, below). Often enough, though, ‘p and q’ seems to imply temporal priority (1b), while in other cases it suggests causal priority (1c). (1) a. Bill bought a shirt and Christy [bought] a sweater. b. Adam took off his shoes and [he] got into bed. c. “Jack fell down and [he] broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling o:ter.” (to rhyme with ‘water’ in an earlier line.”Apparently Grice loved this nursery rhyme too, “Jack is an Englishman; he must, therefore, be brave,” Jill says.” (Grice, “Aspects of reason.”)Bontly: “Again, one suspects an ambiguity, M1 and M2, but Grice argues that a ‘conversational’ explanation is available and preferable. According to the ‘pragmatist’ or ‘conversationalist’ hypothesis’ (as I shall call it), a temporal or a causal reading of “and” (p.q) may be part of what the UTTERER means, but such a reading I2, are not part of what the sentence means, or the word _and_ means, and thus belong in a general theory of conversation, not the grammar of a specific language.” Oddly, I once noticed that Chomsky, of all people, and since you speak of ‘grammar,’ competence, etc. refers to “A.” Albert? P. Grice in his 1966! Aspects of the theory of syntax. “A. P. Grice wants to say that the temporal succession is not part of the meaning of ‘and.’” I suspect one of Grice’s tutees at Oxford was spreading the unauthorized word! Bontly: “Many an alleged ambiguity seems amenable to Grice’s conversationalist hypothesis. Besides the sentential connectives or truth-functors, a pragmatic explanation has been applied fruitfully to quantifiers (Grice lists ‘all’ and ‘some (at least one’), definite descriptions (Grice lists ‘the,’ ‘the murderer’), the indefinite description (‘a finger’, much discussed by Grice, “He’s meeting a woman this evening.”), the genitive construction (‘Peter’s bat’), and the indirect speech act (‘Can you pass the salt?’) — to mention just a few. The literature on the Griceian treatment of these phenomena is extensive. Some classic treatments are found in the oeuvre of philosophers like Grice, Bach, Harnish, and Davis, and linguists like Horn, Gazdar, and Levinson. But the availability of a pragmatic explanation poses an interesting methodological problem. Prima facie, the alleged ‘ambiguity’ M1 and M2, can now be explained either semantically (by positing two or more senses S1 and S2, or M1 and M2, of expression E) or pragmatically (by positing just one sense (S) plus one super-imposed implicaturum, I).Sometimes, of course, one approach or the other is transparently inadequate. When the ‘use’ of E cannot be derived from a general conversational principle, the pragmatic explanation seems a non-starter.” Not for a radically radical pragmatist like Atlas! Ambitious! Similarly, an ambiguity- or polysemy- based explanation seems out of the question where the interpretation of E at issue is highly context-dependent.” (My favourite is Grice on “a,” that you analyse in term of ‘developmental’ or ontogenetical pragmatics – versus Millikan’s phylogenetical! But, in many cases, a semantic, or polysemy, and a conversational explanations both appear plausible, and the usual data — Grice’s intuitions about how the expression can and cannot be used, should or shouldn’t beused — appear to leave the choice of one of the two hypotheses under-determined.These were the cases that most interest Grice, the philosopher, since they impinge on various projects in philosophical analysis. (Cf. Grice, 1989, pp. 3–21 and passim).” Notably the ‘ordinary-language’ philosophy ‘project,’ I would think. I love the fact that in the inventory of philosophers who are loose about this (as in the reference you mention above, pp. 3-21, he includes himself in “Causal theory of perception”! “To adjudicate these border-line cases, Grice (1978) proposes a methodological principle which he dubs “Modified Occam’s Razor,” M. O. R.” ‘Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.’ (1978, pp. 118–119) “(I follow Grice in using the Latinate ‘Occam’ rather than the Anglo-Saxon ‘Ockham’ which is currently preferred). More fully, the idea is that one should not posit an alleged special, stronger SENSE S2, for an expression E when a general conversational principle suffices to explain why E, which bears only Sense 1, S1, receives a certain interpretation or carries implicaturum I. Thus, if the ‘use’ (or an ‘use’) of E can be explained pragmatically, other things being equal, the use should be explained pragmatically.” Griceians appeal to M. O. R. quite often,” pragmatically bearded or not! (I love Quine’s idea that Occam’s razor was created to shave Plato’s beard. Cfr. Schiffer’s anti-shave! It is affirmed, in spirit if not letter, by philosopher/linguist Atlas and Levinson, philosopher/linguist Bach, Bach and philosopher Harnish, Horn, Levinson, Morgan, linguist/philosopher Neale, philosopher Searle, philosopher Stalnaker, philosopher Walker (of Oxford), and philosopher Ziff” (I LOVE Ziff’s use, seeing that he could be otherwise so anti-Griceian, vide Martinich, “On Ziff on Grice on meaning,” and indeed Stampe (that you mention) on Ziff on Grice on meaning. One particularly forceful statement is found in “of all people” Kripke, who derides the ambiguity hypothesis as ‘the lazy man’s approach in philosophy’ and issues a strong warning.” When I read that, I was reminded that Stampe, in some unpublished manuscripts, deals with the loose use of Griceian ideas by Kripke. Stampe discusses at length, “Let’s get out of here, the cops are coming.” Stampe thinks Kripke is only superficially a Griceian! Kripke: “‘Do not posit an ambiguity unless you are really forced to, unless there are really compelling theoretical (or intuitive) grounds to suppose that an ambiguity really is present’ (1977, p. 20). A similar idea surfaces in Ruhl’s principle of “mono-semic” bias’. One’s initial effort is directed toward determining a UNITARY meaning S1 for a lexical item E, trying to attribute apparent variations (S2) in meaning to other factors. If such an effort fails, one tries to discover a means of relating the distinct meanings S1 and S2. If this effort fails, there are several words: E1 and E2 (1989, p. 4).” Grice’s ‘vice’ and Grice’s ‘vyse,’ different words in English, same in Old Roman (“violent.”). Ruhl’s position differs from Grice’s approach. Whereas Grice takes word-meaning to be its WEAKEST exhibited meaning, Ruhl argues that word-meaning can be so highly abstract or schematic as to provide only a CORE of meaning, making EVEN the weakest familiar reading a pragmatic specialisation.” Loved that! Ruhl as more Griceian than Grice! Indeed, Grice is freely using the very abstract notion of a Fregeian ‘sense,’ with the delicacy you would treat a brick! “The difference between Grice’s and Ruhl’s positions raises issues beyond the scope of the present essay (though see Atlas, 1989, for further discussion).”  I will! Atlas knows everything you wanted to know, and more, especially when it comes to linguists! He has a later book with ‘implicaturum’ in its subtitle. “Considering the central role that “M. O. R.” plays in Grice’s programme, one is thus surprised to find barely any attention paid to whether it is a good principle — to whether it is true that a pragmatic explanation, when available, is in general more likely to be true than its ‘ambiguity’ or polysemy, or bi-semy, or aequi-vocal rival.” Trying to play with this, I see that Grice loves ‘aequi-vocal.’ He thinks that ‘must’ is ‘aequi-vocal’ between an alethic and a practical ‘use.’ It took me some time to process that! He means that since it’s the ‘same,’ ‘aequi’, ‘voice’, vox’. So ‘aequi-vocal’ IS ‘uni-vocal.’ The Aristotelian in Grice, I guess! “Grice himself offers vanishingly little argument.” How extended is a Harvard philosophical audience’s attention-span? “Examining just two (out of the blue, unphilosophical) cases where we seem happy to attribute a secondary or derivative sense S2 to one word or expression E, but not another, Grice notes that, in both cases, the supposition that the expression E has an additional sense S2 is not superfluous, or unparsimonious, accounting for certain facets of the use of E that cannot, apparently, be explained pragmatically.” I wonder if a radically radical pragmatist would agree! I never met a polysemous expression! Grice concludes that, therefore, ‘there is as yet no reason NOT to accept M. O. R. ’ (1978, p. 120) — faint praise for a principle so important to his philosophical programme! Besides this weak argument for “M. O. R.,” Grice (1978) also mentions a few independent, rather loose, tests for alleged ambiguity.” (“And how to fail them,” as Zwicky would have it!) But Grice’s rationale for “M. O. R.,” presumably, is a thought Grice does not bother to articulate, thinking perhaps that the principle’s name, its kinship with Occam’s famous razor, ‘Do not multiply entities beyond necessity,’ made its epistemic credentials sufficiently obvious already.” Plus, Harvard is very Occamist!“To lay it out, though, the thought is surely that parsimony -- and other such qualities as simplicity, generality, and unification -- are always prized in scientific (and philosophical?) explanation, the more parsimonious (etc.) of two otherwise equally adequate theories being ipso facto more likely to be true. If, as would seem to be the case, a pragmatic explanation were more parsimonious than its semantic, or ‘conventionalist,’ or ambiguity, or polysemic, or polysemy or bi-semic rival, the conversational explanation would be supported by an established, received, general principle of scientific inference.” I love your exploration of Newton on this below! Hypotheses non fingo! “Certainly, some such argument is on Grice’s mind when he names his principle as he does, and much the same thought surely lies behind Kripke’s references to ‘general methodological considerations’ and ‘considerations of economy’ Other ‘Griceian’ appeals to these theoretical virtues are even more transparent. Linguist J. L. Morgan tells us, for instance, that ‘Occam’s Razor dictates that we take a Gricean account of an indirect speech act as the correct analysis, lacking strong evidence to the contrary’ Philosopher Stalnaker argues that a major advantage accrues to a pragmatic treatment of Strawson’s presupposition in that ‘there will then be no need to complicate the semantics or the lexicon’” or introduce metaphysically dubious truth-value gaps! Linguist S. C. Levinson suggests that a major selling point for a conversational theory in general is that such a theory promises to ‘effect a radical simplification of the semantics’ and ‘approximately halve the size of the lexicon’.” So we don’t need to learn two words, ‘vyse’ and ‘vice.’ There can be little doubt, therefore, that a Griceian takes parsimony to argue for the pragmatic approach.” I use the rather pedantic and awful spelling “Griceian,” so that I can keep the pronunciation /grais/ and also because Fodor used it! And non-philosophers, too! “But a parsimony argument is notoriously problematic, and the argument for “M. O. R.” is no exception. The preference for a parsimonious theory is surprisingly difficult to justify, as is the assumption that a pragmatic explanation IS more parsimonious. This does not mean Grice’s “M. O. R.” is entirely without merit. On the contrary, Grice is right to hold that senses should not be multiplied, if a conversational principle will do.” But the justification for M. O. R. need have nothing to do with the idea that parsimony is, always and everywhere, a virtue in scientific theories.”  Also because we are dealing with philosophy, not science, here? What makes Grice’s “M. O. R.” reasonable, rather, is a set of assumptions about the psychological processes involved in language learning, development, and acquisition, and I will report some empirical (rather than conceptual, as Grice does) evidence that these assumptions are, at least, roughly correct. One disclaimer. While I shall defend Grice’s “M. O. R.,” and therefore the research programme initiated by Grice, it is not my goal here to vindicate any specific pragmatic account, nor to argue that any given linguistic phenomenon requires a pragmatic explanation.” This reminds me of Kilgariff, a Longman linguist. He has a lovely piece, “I don’t believe in word SENSE!” I think he found that Longman had, under ‘horse’: 1. Quadruped animal. 2. Painting of a horse, notably by Stubbs! He did not like that! Why would ‘sense,’ a Fregeian notion, have a place in something like ‘lexicography,’ that deals with corpuses and statistics? “The task is, rather, to understand the logic of a particular type of inference, a type of Griceian inference that can be and has been employed by a philosopher such as Grice who disagree on many other points of theory. Since it would be impossible within the confines of this essay to discuss these disagreements, or to do justice to the many ways in which Grice’s paradigm or programme has been revised and extended (palaeo-Griceians, neo-Griceians, post-Griceians), my discussion is confined to a few hackneyed examples hackneyed by Grice himself, and to Grice’s orthodox theory, if a departure therefrom will be noted where relevant. The conversational explanation of an alleged ambiguity or polysemy or bi-semy aims to show how an utterer U can take an expression E with one conventional meaning and use it as if it had other meanings as well. Typically, this requires showing how the utterer U’s intended message can be ‘inferred,’ with the aid of a general principle of communicative behaviour, from the conventional meaning or sense of the word E that U utters. In Grice’s pioneering account, for instance, the idea is that speech is subject to a Principle of Conversational Co-Operation (In earlier Oxford seminars, where he introduced ‘implicaturum’ he speaks of two principles in conflict: the principle of conversational self-interest, and the principle of conversational benevolence! I much love THAT than the rather artificial Kant scheme at Harvard). ‘Make your conversational contribution, or move, such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the conversational exchange in which you are engaged.’(1975, p. 44). “Sub-ordinate to the Principle of Conversational Co-Operation are four conversational maxims (he was jocularly ‘echoing’ Kant!) falling under the four Kantian conversational categories of Quality, Quantity, Relation, and Modus. Roughly: Make your contribution true. Kant’s quality has to do with affirmation and negation, rather. Make your contribution informative. Kant’s quantity has to do with ‘all’ and ‘one,’ rather. Make your contribution relevant. Kant’s relation God knows what it has to do with. Make your contribution perspicuous [sic]. Kant’s modus has to do with ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent.’ Grice actually has ‘sic’ in the original “Logic and Conversation.” It’s like the self-refuting Kantian. Also in ‘be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity’” ‘proguard obfuscation,’ sort of thing? “… further specifying what cooperation entails (pp. 45–46).” It’s sad Grice did not remember about the principle of conversational benevolence clashing with the principle of conversational self-interest, or dismissed the idea, when he wrote that ‘retro-spective’ epilogue about the maxims, etc. Bontly: “Unlike the constitutive (to use Anscombe and Searle, not regulative) principles of a grammar, the Principle of Conversational Co-Operation and the conversational, universalisable, maxims are to be thought of not as an arbitrary convention – vide Lewis -- but rather as a rational STRATEGY or guideline (if ‘strategy’ is too strong) for achieving one’s communicative ends.” I DO think ‘strategy’ is too strong. A strategist is a general: it’s a zero-sum game, war. I think Grice’s idea is that U is a rational agent dealing with his addressee A, another rational agent. So, it’s not strategic rationality, but communicative rationality. But then I’m being an etymologist! Surely chess players speak of ‘strategies,’ but then they also speak of ‘check mate,” kill the king! Bontly quotes from Grice: “‘[A]nyone who cares about the goals that are central to conversation,’ says Grice, ought to find the principle of conversational cooperation eminently reasonable (p. 49).” If not rational! I love Grice’s /: rational/reasonable. He explores on this later, “The price of that pair of shoes is not reasonable, but hardly irrational!” Bontly: “Like a grammar, however, the principle of conversational co-operation is (supposedly) tacitly known (or assumed) by conversationalists, who can thus call on it to interpret each other’s conversational moves.” Exactly. Parents teach their children well, not to lie, etc. “These interpretive practices being mutual ‘knowledge,’ or common ground, moreover, an utterer U can plan on his co-conversationalist B using the principle of conversational cooperation, to interpret his own utterances, enabling him to convey a good deal of information (and influencing) implicitly by relying on others to infer his intended meaning.”INFORMING seems to do, because, although Grice makes a distinction between ‘informing’ and ‘influencing,’ he takes an ‘exhibitive’ approach. So “Close the door!” means “I WANT YOU To believe that I want you to close the door.” I.e. I’m informing – influencing VIA informing. “Detailed discussions of Grice’s principle of conversational cooperation are found in many of the essays collected in Grice (1989), as well as in the work by linguists like Levinson (1983) and linguist/philosopher Neale (1992). Extensions and refinements of Grice’s approach are developed by linguist Horn (1972), linguist/philosopher Bach and philosopher Harnish (1979), linguist Gazdar (1979), linguist/philosopher Atlas and philosopher Levinson (1981), anthropologist Sperber and linguist Wilson (1986), linguist/philosopher Bach (1994), linguisdt Levinson (2000), and linguist Carston (2002).). The Principle of conversational cooperation and its conversational maxims allow Grice to draw a distinction between two dimensions of an utterer’s meaning within the total significance.” I never liked that Grice uses “signification,” here when in “Meaning” he had said: “Words, for all that Locke said, are NOT signs.” “We apply ‘sign’ to traffic signals, not to ‘dog’.” Bontly: “That which is ‘closely related to the conventional meaning of the word’ uttered is what the utterer has SAID (1975, p. 44),” or the explicatum, or explicitum. That which must instead be inferred with the aid of the principle of conversational cooperation is what the utterer U has conversationally implicated, the IMPLICATURUM (pp. 49–50), or implicitum. This dichotomy is in several ways oversimplified. First, Grice (1975, 1978) also makes room for ‘conventional’ implicaturums (“She was poor BUT she was honest”) and non-conversational non-conventional implicaturums (“Thank you,” abiding with the maxim, ‘be polite’), although these dimensions are both somewhat controversial (cf. Bach’s attack on conventional implicaturum) and can be set aside here. Also controversial is the precise delineation of Grice’s notion of what is said.” He grants he is using ‘say’ ‘artifiicially,’ which means, “natural TO ME!.” Some (anthropologist Sperber and linguist Wilson, 1986; linguist Carston, 1988, 2002; philosopher Recanati, 1993) hold that ‘what is said,’ the DICTUM, the explicatum, or explicitum, is significantly underdetermined by the conventional meaning of the word uttered, with the result that considerable pragmatic intrusive processing must occur even to recover what the utterer said.” And Grice allows that an implicaturum can occur within the scope of an operator.“Linguist/philosopher Bach disagrees, though he does add an ‘intermediate’ dimension (that of conversational ‘impliciture’) which is, in part, pragmatically determined, enriched, or intruded. For my purpose, the important distinction is between that element of meaning which is conventional or ‘encoded’ and that element which is ‘inferred,’ ab-duced, or pragmatically determined, whether or not it is properly considered part of what is said,” in Grice’s admittedly artificial use of this overused verb! (“A horse says neigh!”) A conversational implicaturum can itself be either particularized (henceforth, PCIs) or generalized (GCIs) (56).” Most familiar examples of implicaturum are particularised, where the inference to the utterer U’s intended meaning relies on a specific assumption regarding the context of utterance.” Grice’s first example, possibly, “Jones has beautiful handwriting” (Grice 1961).“Alter that context much at all and the implicaturum will simply disappear, perhaps to be replaced by another. With a generalised implicaturum, on the other hand, the inference or abduction to U’s intended interpretation is relatively context-independent, going through unless special clues to the contrary are provided to defeat it.”Love the ‘defeat.’ Levinson cites one of Grice’s unpublications as “Probability, defeasibility, and mood operators,” where Grice is actually writing, “desirability.”! “For instance, an utterance of the sentence” ‘SOME residents survived the earth-quake,’ would quite generally, absent any special clues to the contrary, seem to implicate that not all survived. All survived, alas, seems to be, to some, no news. Cruel world. No special ‘stage-setting’ has to be provided to make the implicaturum appreciable. No particular context needs to be assumed in order to calculate the likely intended meaning. All one needs to know is that an utterer U who thought that everyone, all residents survived the earthquake (or that none did?) would probably make this stronger assertion (in keeping with Grice’s first sub-maxim of Quantity: ‘Make your contribution as informative as required’).” Perhaps it’s best to deal with buildings. “Some – some 75%, I would say -- of the buildings did not collapse after the earth-quake on the tiny island, and fortunately, no fatalities need be reported. It wasn’t such a big earth-quake as pessimist had predicted.” “A Gricean should maintain that the ‘ambiguity’ of “some” -> “not all” canvassed at the outset can all be explained in terms of a generalized conversational implicaturum. For instance, linguist Horn shows, in his PhD on English, how an exclusive use of ‘or’ can be treated as a consequence of the maxim of Quantity. Roughly, since ‘p AND q’ is always ‘more informative,’ stronger, than ‘p or q’, an utterer U’s choosing to assert only the disjunction would ordinarily indicate that he takes one or the other disjunct to be false. He could assert the conjunction anyway, but then he would be violating Grice’s first submaxim of Quality: ‘Do not say what you believe to be false’ For similar reasons, the assertion of a disjunction would ordinarily seem to implicate that the utterer U does not know which disjunct is true (otherwise he would assert that disjunct rather than the entire disjunction) and hence, and this is the way Grice puts it, which is technically, the best way, that the utterer wants to be ‘interpreted’ as having some ‘non-truth-functional grounds’ for believing the disjunction (philosopher Grice, 1978; linguist Gazdar, 1979).  For recall that this all goes under the scope of a psychological attitude. In “Method in psychological philosophy: from the banal to the bizarre,” repr. in “The conception of value,” Grice considers proper disjunctions: “The eagle is not sure whether to attack the rabbit or the dove.” I think Loar plays with this too in his book for Cambridge on meaning and mind and Grice. “Grice (1981) takes a similar line with regard to asymmetric uses of ‘and’.” Indeed, I loved his “Jones got into bed and took off his clothes, but I do not want to suggest in that order.” “Is that a linguistic offence?” Don’t think so!” “The fourth submaxim of Manner,” ‘be orderly’ -- I tend to think this is ad-hoc and that Grice had this maxim JUST to explain away the oddity of “She got a children and married,” by Strawson in Strawson 1952. “says that utterers should be ‘orderly,’ and when describing a sequence of events, an orderly presentation would normally describe the events in the order in which they occurred. So an utterance of  (1b) (‘Jones took off his trousers – he had taken off his shoes already -- and got into bed.’ “would ordinarily (unless the utterer U ‘indicates’ otherwise) implicate that Jones did so in that order, hence the temporal reading of ‘and’.” “(Grice’s (1981) account of asymmetric ‘and’ seems NOT to account for causal interpretations like (1c).”Ryle says in “Informal logic,” 1953, in Dilemmas, “She felt ill and took arsenic,” has the conscript ‘and’ of Whitehead and Russell, not the ‘civil’ ‘and’ of the informalist. “Oxonian philosopher R. C. S. Walker – what took him to respond to Cohen? Walker quotes from Bostock, who was Grice’s tutee at St. John’s -- (1975, p. 136) suggests that the causal reading can be derived from the maxim of Relation.”Nowell-Smith had spoken of ‘be relevant’ in Ethics. But Grice HAD to be a Kantian!“Since conversationalists are expected to make their utterances relevant, one expects that conjoined sentences will ‘have some bearing to one another’, often a causal bearing. More nearly adequate accounts of the temporal and causal uses of ‘and’ (so-called ‘conjunction buttressing’) are found in linguist/philosopher Atlas and linguist Levinson (1981) and in linguist Levinson (1983, 2000). Linguist Carston (1988, 2002) develops a rival pragmatic account within the framework of anthropologist Sperber’s and linguist Wilson’s Relevance Theory, on which temporal and causal readings are explicatures rather than implicaturums. For the purposes of this essay, it is immaterial which of these accounts best accords with the data. In these and many other cases, it seems that a general principle regarding communicative RATIONALITY can provide an alternative to positing a semantic ambiguity.”Williamson is lecturing at Yale that ‘rationality’ has little to do with it!“But a Gricean goes a step further and claims that the implicaturum account (when available) is BETTER than an ambiguity or polysemy account. One possible argument for the stronger thesis is that the various specialised uses of ‘or’ (etc.) bear all the usual hallmarks of a conversational implicaturum. An implicaturum is: calculable (i.e. derivable from what is said or dictum or explicatum or explicitum via the Principle of conversational cooperation and the conversational maxims); cancellable (retractable without contradiction), and; non-detachable (incapable of being paraphrased away) Grice, 1975, pp. 50 and 57–58). They ought also to be, sort of, universal.” (Cf. Elinor Keenan Ochs, “The universality of conversational implicaturum.” I hope Williamson considers this. In Madagascar, they have other ‘norms’ of conversation: since speakers are guarded, implicatura to the effect, “I don’t know” are never invited! Unlike the true lexical ambiguity that arises from a language-specific convention, an implicaturum derives rather from general features of communicative RATIONALITY and should thus be similar across different languages (philosopher Kripke, 1977; linguist Levinson, 1983).”I’m not sure. Cfr. Ochs in Madagascar. But she is a linguist/anthropologist, rather than a philosopher? From a philosophical point of view, perhaps the best who treated this issues is English philosopher Martin Hollis in his essays on ‘rationality’ and ‘relativism’ (keywords!)“Since the ‘ambiguity’ in question here has all these features, at least to some degree, the implicaturum approach may well seem irresistible. It is well known, however, that none of the features listed on various occasions by Grice are sufficient (individually or jointly) to establish the presence of a conversational implicaturum (Grice, 1978; linguist Sadock, 1978). Take calculability.” Or how to ‘work it out,’ to keep it Anglo-Saxon, as pretentious Grice would not! The main difficulty is that a conversationalimplicaturum can become fossilized, or ‘conventionalised’ over time but remain calculable nonetheless, as happens with some ‘dead’ metaphors — one-time non-literal uses which congealed into a new conventional meaning.” A linguist at Berkeley worked on this, Traugott, on items in the history of the English language, or H-E-L, for short, H.O.T.E.L, history of the English language. I don’t think Grice considers this. He sticks with old Roman ‘animal’ -> ‘non-human’, strictly, having a ‘soul,’ or animus, anima. (I think Traugott’s focus was on verb forms, like “I have eaten,” meaning, literally, “I possess eating,” or something. But she does quote Grice and speaks of fossilization. “For instance, the expression.” ‘S went to the bathroom’ (Jones?) could, for obvious reasons, be used with its original, compositional, meaning to implicate that S ‘relieved himself’.” “The intended meaning would still be calculable today.”Or “went to powder her nose?” (Or consider the pre-Griceian (?) child’s overinformative, standing from table at dinner, “I’m going to the bathroom to do number 2 (unless he is flouting the maxim). “But the use has been absorbed, or encoded into some people’s grammar, as witnessed by the fact that  ‘S went to the bathroom on the living room carpet.’ is not contradictory (linguist J. L. Morgan, 1978; linguist Sadock, 1978).”I wonder what some contextualists at Yale (De Rose) would say about that!? Cf. Jason Stanley, enfant terrible. “Grice’s cancellability is similarly problematic. While one may cancel the exclusive interpretation of ‘p or q’ (e.g. by adding ‘or possibly both’), the added remark could just as well be disambiguating an ambiguous utterance as canceling the implicaturum (philosopher Walker, 1975; linguist Sadock, 1978).”Excellent POINT! Walker would be fascinated to see that Grice once coined ‘disimplicaturum’ for some loose uses. “Macbeth saw Banquo.” “That tie is yellow under that light, but orange under this one.” Actually, Grice creates ‘disimplicaturum’ to refute Davidson on intending: “Jones intends to climb Mt Everest next weekend.” Intending DOES entail BELIEF, but people abuse ‘intend’ and use it ‘loosely,’ with one sense dropped. Similarly, Grice says, with “You’re the cream in my coffee,” where the ‘disimplicaturum’ is TOTAL!“Non-detachability fares no better. When two sentences are synonymous (if there is, pace Quine, such a thing), utterances of them ought to generate the same implicaturum. But they will also have the same semantic implications, so the non-detachability of an alleged implicaturum shows very little if anything at all (linguist Sadock, 1978).”I never liked non-detachability, because it ENTAILS that there MUST be a synonym expression: cfr. God? Divinity? “Universality is perhaps the best test of the four.”I agree. When linguists like Elinor Keenan disregard this, I tend to think: “the cunning of conversational reason,” alla Hollis. Grice was a member of Austin’s playgroup, and the conversational MAXIMS were ‘universalisable’ within THAT group. That seems okay for both Kant AND Hegel!“Since an implicaturum can fossilise into a conventional meanings, however, it is always possible for a cross-linguistic alleged ‘ambiguity’ to be pragmatic in some language though lexical in another.”Is that ‘f*rnication’? Or is it Grice on ‘pushing up the daisies’ as an “established idiom” for ‘… is dead’ in WJ5? Austin and Grice would I think take for granted THREE languages: Greek and Roman, that they studied at their public schools – and this is important, because Grice says his method of analysis is somehow grounded on his classical education – and, well, English. Donald Davidson, in the New World, would object to the ‘substantiation’ that speaking of “Greek” as a language, say, may entail.“So while Grice’s tests are suggestive, they supply no clear verdict on the presence of an implicaturum. Besides these inconclusive tests for implicaturum, Grice could also appeal to various diagnostic tests for alleged ambiguity.” “And how to fail them,” to echo Zwicky. Grice himself suggests three, although none of them prove terribly helpful.”Loved your terrible. Cfr. ‘terrific’. And the king entering St. Paul’s cathedral: “Aweful!” meaning ‘awe-some!’“First, Grice points out that each alleged sense Sn of an allegedly ambiguous word E ought to be expressible ‘in a reasonably wide range of linguistic environments’ (1978, p. 117). The fact that the strong implicaturum of ‘or’ is UNavailable within the scope of a negation, for instance, would seem to count AGAINST alleged ambiguity or polysemy. On the other hand, the strong implicaturum of ‘or’ IS available within the scope of a propositional-attitude verb. A strong implicaturum of ‘and’ is arguably available in both environments, within the scope of a negation, and within the scope of a psychological-attitude verb. So the first test seems a wash.”Metaphorically, or implicaturally. J“Second, Grice says, if the expression E is ambiguous with one sense S2 being derived (somehow) from the initial or original or etymological sense S1, that derivative sense S2 ‘ought to conform to whatever principle there may be which governs the generation of derivative senses’ (pp. 117–118).”GRICE AT HIS BEST! I think he is trying to irritate Quine, who is seating on second row at Harvard! (After all Quine thought he was a field linguist!)Bontly, charmingly: “Not knowing the content of thi principle Grice invokes— and Grice gives us no hint as to what it might be — we cannot bring it, alas, to bear here!”I THINK he was thinking Ullman. At Oxford, linguists were working on ‘semantics,’ cfr. Gardiner. And he just thought that it would be Unphilosophical on his part to bore his philosophical Harvard audience with ‘facts.’ At one point he does mention that the facts of the history of the English language (how ‘disc’ can be used, etc.) are not part of the philosopher’s toolkit?“Third and finally, Grice says, we must ‘give due (but not undue) weight to MY INTUITIONS about the existence (or indeed non-existence) of a putative sense S2 of a word E.’ (p. 120).”Emphasis on ‘my’ mine! -- As I say, I never had any intuition about an expression having an extra-putative sense. Not even ‘bank,’ – since in Old Germanic, it’s all etymologically related!Bontly: “But, even granting the point that ‘or’ is NON-INTUITIVELY ambiguous in quite the same way that ‘bank’ IS, allegedly, INTUITIVELY ambiguous, the source of our present difficulty is precisely the fact that ‘p or q’ often *seems* intuitively to imply that one or the other disjunct is false.”Grice apparently uses ‘intuition’ and ‘introspection’ interchangeably, if that helps? Continental phenomenological philosophers would make MUCH of this! For Grice’s intuitions are HIS own. In a lecture at Wellesley, of all places (in Grice 1989) he writes: “My problems with my use of E arise from MY intuitions about the use of E. I don’t care how YOU use E. Philosophy is personal.” Much criticised, but authentic, in a way!“Since he discounts the latter intuition, Grice cannot place much weight on the former!”As I say, Grice’s intuitions are hard to fathom! So are his introspections! Actually, I think that Grice’s sticking with introspections and intuitions save him, as Suppes shows in PGRICE ed Grandy and Warner, from being a behaviourist. He is, rather, an intentionalist!“While a complete review of ambiguity tests is beyond the scope of this essay, we have perhaps seen enough to motivate the methodological problem with which we began: viz., that an, intuitive, alleged, ambiguity seems fit to be explained either semantically (ambiguity thesis, polysemy, bi-semy) or pragmatically/conversationally, with little by way of direct evidence to tell us which is which!”“If philosophy generated no problems, it would be dead!” – Grice. J“Linguists Zwicky and Sadock review several linguistic tests for ambiguity (e.g. conjunction reduction) and point out that most are ill-suited to detect ambiguities where the meanings in question are privative opposites,”Oddly, Grice’s first publication ever was on “Negation and privation,” 1938!Bontly: “i.e. where one meaning is a specialization or specification of the other (as for instance with the female and neutral senses of ‘goose’).”Or cf. Urmson, “There is an animal in the backyard.” “You mean Aunt Matilda?”Bontly: “Since the putative ambiguities of ‘or’ and the like are all of this sort, it seems inevitable that these tests will fail us here as well. For further discussion, see linguist Horn (1989, pp. 317–18 and 365–66) and linguist Carston (2002, pp. 274–77).It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find that a Gricean typically falls back on a methodological argument like parsimony, as instantiated in “M. O. R.”Let’s now turn to Parsimony and Its Problems. It may, at first, be less than obvious why an ambiguity or polysemy or bi-semy account should be deemed less parsimonious than its Gricean rival.” Where the conventionalist or ambiguist posits an additional sense S2, Grice adds, to S1, a conversational implicaturum, I”. Cheap, but no free lunch! (Grice saves)Bontly: “Superficially, little seems to be gained.” Ah, the surfaces of Oxford superficiality! “Looking closer, however, the methodological virtues of the Grice’s approach seem fairly clear.”Good!Bontly: “First, the principles and inference patterns that a pragmatic or conversational account utilizes are independently motivated. The principles and inference patterns are needed in any case to account for the relatively un-controversial class of particularized implicatura, and they provide an elegant approach to phenomena like figures of rhetoric, or speech -- metaphor, irony, meiosis, litotes, understatement, sarcasm – cfr. Holdcroft -- and tricks like Strawson’s presupposition. So it would seem that Grice can make do with explanatory material already on hand, whereas the ambiguity or polysemy theorist must posit a new semantic rule in each and every case. Furthermore, the explanatory material has an independent grounding in considerations of rationality.”I love that evening when Grice received a phonecall at Berkeley: “Professor Grice: You have been appointed the Immanuel Kant Memorial Lecturer at Stanford.” He gave the lectures on aspects of reason and reasoning!Bontly: “Since conversation is typically a goal-directed activity, it makes sense for conversationalists to abide by the Principle of Conversational Cooperation (something like Kant’s categorical imperative, in conversational format) and its (universalisable) conversational maxims, and so it makes sense for a co-conversationalist to interpret the conversationalist accordingly. A pragmatic explanation is therefore CHEAP – hence Occam on ‘aeconomicus’ -- the principle it calls on being explainable by — and perhaps even reducible to — facts about rational behavior in general.”I loved your “REDUCE.” B. F. Loar indeed thought, and correctly, that the maxims are ‘empirical generalisations over functional states.’ Genius!Bontly: A pragmatic account is not only more economic, or cheaper. It also reveals an orderliness or systematicity that positing a separate lexical ambiguity or polysemy or bisemy in each and every case would seem to miss (linguist/philosopher Bach). To a Griceian, it is no accident that a sentential connective or truth-functor (“not,” “and,” “or,” and “if”), a quantified expression (Grice’s “all” and “some (at least one)”) and a description (Grice’s “the”) all lend themselves to a weak and a stronger interpretation”Cf. Holdcroft, “Weak or strong?” in “Words and deeds.”Bontly: “Note, for instance, that a sentence with the logical form ‘Some Fs are Gs’,  and the pleonethetic, to use Geach’s and Altham’s coinage, ‘Most Fs are Gs’, and ‘A few Fs are Gs’ are all allegedly ‘ambiguous’ in the SAME way. Each of those expressions has an obvious weak reading in addition to a stronger reading: ‘Not all Fs are Gs’.Good because Grice’s first examination was: “That pillar-box seems red to me.” And he analyses the oddness in terms of ‘strength.’ (Grice 1961). He tries to analyse this ‘strength’ in terms of ‘entailment,’ but fails (“Neither ‘The pillar-box IS red’ NOR ‘The pillar-box SEEMS red’ entail each other.”)Bontly: For the conventionalist or polysemy theorist, there is no apparent reason why this should be so. There is no reason, that is, why three etymologically unrelated words (“some,” “most,” and “few”) should display the SAME pattern of alleged ambiguity. The Gricean, on the other hand, explains each the SAME way, by appealing to some rational principle of conversation. The implicatura are all ‘scalar’ quantity implicatura, attributable to the utterer U’s having uttered a weaker, less informative, sentence than he might have.” Linguist Levinson, 1983). Together, these considerations make a persuasive case for the Grice’s approach. A pragmatic explanation is more economical, and the resulting view of conversation is more natural and unified. Since economy and unification are both presumably virtues to be sought in a scientific or philosophical explanation — virtues which for brevity I lump together under Occamist ‘parsimony’ — it would NOT be unreasonable to conclude that a pragmatic explanation is (ceteris paribus) a better explanation. So it seems that Grice’s principle, the “M. O. R.” is correct. Senses ought not to be multiplied when pragmatics will do. Still, there are several reasons to be suspicious of the parsimony argument. “I lay out three. It bears emphasis that none of these are objections to the pragmatic approach per se.” I have no quarrel with the theory of conversation or particular attempts to apply it to conversational phenomena. The objections focus rather on the role that parsimony (or simplicity, or generality, etc.) plays in arguments PRO the implicaturum and CONTRA ambiguity or polysemy.” Then, there’s Dead Metaphors. First is a worry that parsimony is too blunt an instrument, generalizing to unwanted conclusions. Versions of this objection appear in philosopher Walker (1975), linguist Morgan (1978), and linguist Sadock (1978).” More recently, Reimer (1998) and Devitt (forthcoming) use it to argue against a Gricean treatment of the referential/attributive distinction.”But have they read Grice’s VACUOUS NAMES? I know you did! Grice notes: “My distinction has nothing to do with Donnellan’s!” Grice’s approach is syntactic: ‘the’ and “THE,” identificatory and non-identificatory uses. R. M. Sainsbury and D. E. Over have worked on this. Fascinating. Bontly: “For as with the afore-mentioned so-called ‘dead’ metaphor, it can happen that a word has a secondary use that is pragmatically predictable, and yet fully conventional. In many such cases, of course, the original, etymological meaning is long forgotten: e. g. the contemporary use of ‘fornication’, originally a euphemism for activities done in fornice (that is, in the vaulted underground dwellings that once served as brothels in Rome). (I owe this [delightful] example to Sam Wheeler). Few speakers recall the original meaning, so the metaphor can no longer be ‘calculated,’ as Grice’s “You’re the cream in my coffee!” (title of song) can!” The metaphor is both dead _and buried_.”Still un-buriable?“In other cases, however, speakers do possess the information to construct a Gricean explanation, and yet the metaphor is dead anyway.”Reimer’s (1998) example of the verb ‘incense’ is a case in point. One conventional meaning (‘to make or become angry’) began life as a metaphorical extension of the other (‘to make fragrant with incense’). The reason for the extension is fairly transparent (resting on familiar comparisons of burning and emotion), but the use allegedly represents an additional sense nonetheless.”What dictionaries have as ‘fig.’ But are we sure that when the dictionaries list things like 1., 2., 3., they are listing SENSES!? Cf. Grice, “I don’t give a hoot what the dictionary says,” to Austin, “And that’s where you make your big mistake.” Once Grice actually opened the dictionary (he was studying ‘feeling + adj.’ – he got to ‘byzantine,’ finding that MOST adjectives did, and got bored!Bontly: Such examples suggest that an implicaturum makes up an important source of semantic—and, according to linguist Levinson (2000), syntactic—innovation. A linguistic phenomenon can begin life as a pragmatic specialization or an extension and subsequently become conventionalized by stages, making it difficult to determine at what point (and for which ‘utterers’) a use has become fully conventional. One consequence is that an expression E can have, allegedly, a second sense S2, even when a pragmatic explanation appears to make it explanatorily superfluous, and parsimony can therefore mislead.”I’m not sure dictionary readers read ‘fig.’ as a different ‘sense,’ and lexicographers need not be Griceian in style!Bontly: “A related point is that an ambiguity account needn’t be LESS unified than an implicaturum account after all. If pragmatic considerations can explain the origin and development of new linguistic conventions, the ambiguity or polysemy theorist can provide a unified dia-chronic account of how several un-related expressions came to exhibit similar patterns of alleged ‘ambiguity.’ Quantifiers like ‘some’, ‘most’, and ‘a few’ may be similarly allegedly ambiguous today because they generated similar implicaturums in the past (cf. Millikan, 2001).”OKAY, so that’s the right way to go then? Diachrony and evolution, right?Bontly: “Then, there’s Tradeoffs. A ‘dead’ metaphor suggests that parsimony is too strong for the pragmatist’s purposes, but as a pragmatic account could have hidden costs to offset the semantic savings, parsimony may also be too weak! E. g. an implicaturum account looks, at least superficially, to multiply (to use Occam’s term) inferential labour, leaving it to the addressee to infer the utterer’s intended meaning from the words uttered, the context, and the conversational principle. Thus there are trade-offs involved, and the account which is semantically more parsimonious may be less parsimonious all things considered.”Grice once invited the “P. E. R. E.,” principle of economy of rational effort, though. Things which seem to be psychologically UNREAL are just DEEMED, tacitly, to occur.Bontly: “To be clear, this is not to suggest that the ambiguity or polysemy account can dispense with inference entirely. Were the exclusive and inclusive senses of ‘or’ BOTH lexically encoded (as they were in Old Roman, ‘vel’ and ‘aut,’ hence Whitehead’s choice of ‘v’ for ‘p v q’) still hearers would need to infer from contextual clues which meaning were intended. The worry is not, therefore, so much that the implicaturum account increases the number of inferences which conversants or conversationalists have to perform. The issue concerns rather the complexity of these inferences. Alleged dis-ambiguation is a highly constrained process. In principle, one need only choose the relevant sense Sn, from a finite list represented in the so-called ‘mental lexicon’. Implicaturum calculation, on the other hand, is a matter of finding the best explanation (abductively, alla Hanson) for an utterer’s utterance, the utterer’s meaning being introduced as an explanatory hypothesis, answering to a ‘why’ question. Unlike dis-ambiguation, where the various possible readings are known in advance, in the conversational explanation, the only constraints are provided by the addressee’s understanding of the context and the conversational principle. So it appears that Grice’s approach saves on the lexical semantics by placing a greater inferential burden on utterer and addressee.”But Grice played bridge, and loved those burdens. Stampe actually gives a lovely bridge alleged counter-example to Grice (in Grice 1989).Bontly: “Now, a Gricean can try to lessen this load in various ways. Grice can argue, for instance, that the inference used to recover a generalised implicaturum is less demanding than that for a particularized one, that familiarity with types of generalised implicate can “stream-line” the inferential process, and so on.”Love that, P. E. R. E., or principle of economy of rational effort, above?!Bontly: “We examine these moves. There’s Justification. Another difficulty with Grice’s appeals to parsimony is the most fundamental. On the one hand, it can hardly be denied that parsimony plays a role in scientific, if not philosophical, inference.” Across the sciences, if not in philosophy, it is standard practice to cite parsimony (simplicity, generality, etc.) as a reason to choose one hypothesis over another; philosophers often do the same.”Bontly’s ‘often’ implicates, ‘often not’! Grice became an opponent of his own minimalism at a later stage of his life, vide his “Prejudices and predilections; which become, the life and opinions of Paul Grice,” by Paul Grice!Bontly: “At the same time, however, it remains quite mysterious, if that’s the word, why parsimony (etc.) should be given such weight by Occamists like Grice. If it were safe to assume that Nature is simple and economical, the preference for theories with these qualities would make perfect sense. Sir Isaac Newton offers such an ontological rationale for parsimony in the “Principia.” Sir Isaac writes (in Roman?) “I am to admit no more cause of a natural thing than such as are true and sufficient to explain its appearance.” “To this purpose, the philosopher says that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less serves.” “For Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of a superfluous cause.” “While a blanket assertion about the simplicity of Nature is hardly uncommon in the history of science, today it is viewed with suspicion.” Bontly:  “Newton’s reasons were presumably theological.” “If I knew that the Creator values simplicity and economy, I should expect the creatION to display these qualities as well.” “Lacking much information about the Creator’s tastes, however, the assumption becomes quite difficult, if not impossible, to support.”Cfr. literature on ‘biological diversity.’Bontly: “(Sober discusses several objections to an ontological justification for the principle of parsimony. Philosopher of science Mary Hesse surveys several other attempts to justify the use of parsimony and simplicity in scientific inference. Philosophers of science today are largely persuaded that the role of parsimony is ‘purely methodological’ epistemological, pragmatist, rather than ontological — that it is rational to reject unnecessary posits (or complex, dis-unified theories) no matter what Nature is like. One might argue, for instance, that the principle of parsimony is really just a principle of minimum risk. The more existence claims one accepts, the greater the chance of accepting a falsehood. Better, then, to do without any existence claim one does not need. Philosopher J. J. C. Smart attributes this view to John Stuart Mill.”Cf. Grice: “Not to bring more Grice to the Mill.”Bontly: “Now, risk minimization may be a reasonable methodological principle, but it does not suffice to explain the role of parsimony in natural science. When a theoretical posit is deemed explanatorily superfluous, the accepted practice is not merely to withhold belief in its existence but to conclude positively that it does not exist. As Sober notes, ‘Occam’s razor preaches atheism about unnecessary entities, not just a-gnosticism.’” Similarly, Grice’s razor tells us that we should believe an expression E to be unambiguous, aequi-vocal, monosemous, unless we have evidence for a second meaning. The absence of evidence for this alleged additional, ‘multiplied’ ‘sense’ is presumed to count as evidence that this alleged second, additional, multiplied, sense is absent, does not exist. But an absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of an absence.” The difficult question about scientific methodology is why we should count one as the other. Why, that is, should a lack of evidence for an existence claim count as evidence for a non-existence claim? The minimum risk argument leaves this question unanswered. Indeed, philosophers of science have had so little success in explaining why parsimony should be a guide to truth that many are tempted to conclude that it and the other ‘super-empirical virtues’ have no epistemic value whatsoever. Their role is rather pragmatic, or aesthetic.”This is in part Strawson’s reply in his “If and the horseshoe” (1968), repr. in PGRICE, in Grandy/Warner. He says words to the effect: “Grice’s theory may be more BEAUTIFUL than mine, but that’s that!” (Strawson thinks that ‘if’ acts as ‘so’ or ‘therefore’ but in UNASSERTED clauses. So it’s a matter of a ‘conventional’ IMPLICATURUM to the inferrability of “if p, q” or “p; so, q.” I agree with Strawson that Grice’s account of ‘conventional’ implicaturum is not precisely too beautiful?Bontly: “Parsimony can make a theory easier to understand or apply, and it pleases those of us with a taste for desert landscapes, but (according to these sceptics) they do not make the theory any more likely to be true.”The reference to the ‘desert landscape’ is genial. Cfr. Strawson’s “A logician’s landscape.” Later in life, Grice indeed found it unfair that an explanation of cherry trees blooming in spring should be explained as a ‘desert landscape.’ “That’s impoverishing it!”Bontly: “van Fraassen, for instance, tells us that a super-empirical virtue ‘does not concern the relation between the theory and the world, but rather the use and usefulness of the theory; it provide reasons to prefer the theory independently of questions of truth.” “If that were correct, it would be doubtful that parsimony can shoulder the burden Grice places on it.” “For then the conventionalist may happily grant that a pragmatic explanation is clever and elegant, and beautiful.”  “The conventionalist can agree that an implicaturum account comprehends a maximum of phenomena with a minimum of theoretical apparatus.” “But when it comes to truth, or alethic satisfactoriness, as Grice would prefer, a conventionalist may insist that parsimony is simply irrelevant.” “One Gricean sympathizer who apparently accepts the ‘aesthetic’ view of parsimony is the philosopher of science R. C. S. Walker (1975), who claims that the ‘[c]hoice between Grice’s and Cohen’s theories is an aesthetic matter’ and concludes that ‘we should not regard either the Conversationalist Hypothesis or its [conventionalist] rivals as definitely right or wrong.’” Cfr. Strawson in Grandy/Warner, but Strawson is no Griceian sympathiser! “Now asking Grice to justify the principle of parsimony may seem a bit unfair.” “Grice also assumes the reality of the external world, the existence of intentional mental states, and the validity of modus ponens.” “Need Grice justify these assumptions as well?” “Of course not!” “But even if the epistemic value of parsimony is taken entirely for granted, it is unclear why it should even count in semantics.” “All sides agree, after all, that many, perhaps even most, expressions of natural language are allegedly ‘ambiguous.’” “There are both poly-semies, where one word has multiple, though related, meanings (‘horn’, ‘trunk’), and homo-nymies, where two distinct words have converged on a single phonological form (‘bat’, ‘pole’).”  “The distinction between poly-semy and homo-nymy is notoriously difficult to draw with any precision, chiefly because we lack clear criteria for the identity of words (Bach).” “If words are individuated phono-logically, there would be no homo-nyms.” “If words are individuated semantically, there would be no poly-semies.” “Individuating words historically leads to some odd consequences: e.g., that ‘bank’ is poly-semous rather than homo-nymous, since the ‘sense’ in which it means financial institution and the ‘sense’ in which it means edge of a river are derived from a common source.” “I owe this example to David Sanford. For further discussion, see Jackendoff.”Soon at Hartford. And Sanford is right!Bontly: “Given that ambiguity is hardly rare, then, one wonders whether a semantic theory ought really to minimize it (cf. Stampe, 1974).” “One might indeed argue that the burden of proof here is on the pragmatist, not the ambiguity or polysemy theorist.” “Perhaps we ought to assume, ceteris paribus, that every regular use of an expression represents a SPECIAL sense.” “Such a methodological policy may be less economical than Grice’s, but it does extend the same pattern of explanation to all alleged ambiguities, and it might even accord better with the haphazard ways in which natural languages are prone to evolve (Millikan, 2001).”Yes, the evolutionary is the way to go!Bontly: “So Grice owe us some reason to think that parsimony and the like should count in semantics.” “He needn’t claim, of course, that parsimony is always and everywhere a reason to believe a hypothesis true.” “He needn’t produce a global justification for Occam’s Razor, that is—a local justification, one specific to language, would suffice.” “I propose to set aside the larger issue about parsimony in general, therefore, and argue that Modified Occam’s Razor can be justified by considerations peculiar to the study of language.” “Now for A Developmental Account of Semantic Parsimony.”  “My approach to parsimony in linguistics is inspired by Sober’s work on parsimony arguments in evolutionary biology.”And Grice was an evolutionary philosopher of sorts.Bontly: “In Sober’s view, philosophers have misunderstood the role of parsimony in scientific inference, taking it to function as a global, domain-general principle of scientific reasoning (akin perhaps to an axiom of the probability calculus).” “A more realistic analysis, Sober claims, shows that parsimony arguments function as tacit references to domain-specific process assumptions — to assumptions (whether clearly articulated or not) about the process(es) that generate the phenomena under study.” “Where these processes tend to be frugal, parsimony is a reasonable principle of theory-choice.” “Where they are apt to be profligate, it is not.” “What makes parsimony reasonable in one area of inquiry may, on Sober’s view, be quite unrelated to the reasons it counts in another.” “Parsimony arguments in the units of selection controversy, for instance, rest on one set of process assumptions (i.e. assumptions about the conditions necessary for ‘group’ selection to occur).” “The application of parsimony to ‘phylogenetic’ inference rests on a completely different set of assumptions (about rates of evolutionary change).” “As Sober notes, in either case the assumptions are empirically testable, and it could turn out that parsimony is a reliable principle of inference in one, both, or neither of these areas. Sober’s approach amounts to a thorough-going local reductionism about parsimony.It counts in theory-choice if and only if there are domain-specific reasons to think the theory which is more economical (in some specifiable respect) is more likely to be true. The ‘only if’ claim is the more controversial part of the bi-conditional, and I need not defend it here. For present purposes I need only the weaker claim that domain-specific assumptions can be sufficient to justify using parsimony — that parsimony is a sensible principle of inference if the phenomena in question result from processes themselves biased, as it were, towards parsimony. Now, in natural-language semantics, the phenomena in question are ordinarily taken to be the semantic rules or conventions shared by a community of speakers.”Cf. Peacocke on Grice as applied to ‘community of utterers,’ in Evans/McDowell, Truth and meaning, Oxford. Bontly: “The task is to uncover the ‘arbitrary’ mappings between a sound and a meaning (or concepts or referent) of which utterers have tacit knowledge. This ‘semantic competence’ is shaped by both the inputs that language learners encounter and the cognitive processes that guide language acquisition from infancy through adulthood. So the question is whether that input and these processes are themselves biased toward semantic parsimony and against the acquisition of multiple meanings for single phonological forms. As I shall now argue, there are several reasons to suspect that such a bias should exist. Psychologists often conceptualize learning in general and word learning in particular as a process of generating and testing hypotheses. A child (or, in many cases, an adult) encounters an unfamiliar word, forms one or more hypotheses as to its possible meaning, checks the hypotheses against the ways in which he hears the word used, and finally adopts one such hypothesis. This ‘child-as-scientist’ model is plainly short on details, but whatever mechanism implements the generating and testing, it would seem that the process cannot be repeated with every subsequent exposure to a word. Once a hypothesis is accepted — a word learned — the process effectively halts, so that the next time the child hears that word, he doesn’t have to hypothesize. Instead, the child can access the known meaning and use it to grasp the intended message. For that reason, an unfamiliar word ought to be the only one to trigger the learning process, and that of course makes ambiguity problematic. Take a person who knows one meaning of an ambiguous word, but not the other. To him, the word is not unfamiliar, even when used with an unfamiliar meaning. At least, it will not sound unfamiliar. So, the learning process will not kick in unless some other source of evidence suggests another, as-yet-unknown meaning. Presumably the evidence will come from ‘anomalous’ utterances: i.e. uses that are contextually absurd, given only the familiar meaning. This is not to say, of course, that hearing one anomalous utterance would be sufficient to re-start the learning process. Since there are other reasons why an utterance may seem anomalous (e.g. the utterer simply misspoke), it might take several anomalies to convince one that the word has another meaning. In the absence of anomalies, however, it seems highly unlikely that learners would seriously entertain the possibility of a second sense. A related point is that acquisition involves, or is at least thought to involve, a variety of ‘boot-strapping’ operations where the learner uses what he knows of the language in order to learn more.”Oddly Grice has a bootstrap principle (it relates to having one’s metalanguage as rich as one’s object-language.Bontly: “It has been argued, for instance, that children use semantic information to constrain hypotheses about words’ syntactic features (Pinker) and, conversely, syntactic information to constrain hypotheses about words’ semantic features (Gleitman). Likewise, children must surely use their knowledge of some words’ meanings to constrain hypotheses as to the meanings of others, thus inferring the meanings of unfamiliar words from context. However, that process only works insofar as one can safely assume that the familiar words in an utterance are typically used with their familiar meanings. If it were assumed that familiar words are typically used with unknown meanings, the bootstraps would be too weak. Together, these considerations point to the hypothesis that language acquisition is semantically conservative. Children will posit new meanings for familiar words only when necessary—only when they encounter utterances that make no sense to them, even though all the words are familiar. Interestingly, experimental work in language acquisition provides empirical evidence for much the same conclusion. Psychologists have long observed that children have considerable difficulties learning and using homo-nyms (Peters and Zaidel), leading many to suspect that young children operate under the helpful, though mistaken, assumption that a word can have but one meaning (Slobin). Children have similar difficulties acquiring synonyms and may likewise assume that a given meaning can be represented by at most one word. (Markman & Wachtel, see Bloom for a different explanation). I cannot here survey the many experimental studies bearing on this hypothesis, but one series of experiments conducted by Michele Mazzocco is particularly germane. Mazzocco presents children from several age-groups, as well as adults, with stories designed to mimic one’s first encounter with the secondary meaning of an ambiguous word. To control the effects of antecedent familiarity with secondary meanings, the stories used familiar words (e.g., ‘rope’) as if they had further unknown meanings—as ‘pseudo-homo-nyms’.For comparison, other stories included a non-sense word (e.g. ‘blus’) used as if it had a conventional meaning — as a ‘pseudo-word’ — to mimic one’s first encounter with an entirely unfamiliar word.”Cf. Grice’s seminar at Berkeley: “How pirots karulise elatically: some simpler ways.”“A pirot  can be said to potch or cotch an obble as fang or feng or fid with another obble.”“A person can be said to perceive or cognize an object as having the property f or f2 or being in a relation R with another object.”Bontly: Some stories, finally, used only genuine words with only their familiar meanings. After hearing a story, subjects are presented with a series of illustrations and asked to pick out the item referred to in the story. In a subsequent experiment, subjects had to act out their interpretations of the stories. In the pseudo-homo-nym condition, one picture would always illustrate the word’s conventional but contextually inappropriate meaning, one would depict the unfamiliar but contextually appropriate meaning, and the rest would be distractors. As one would expect, adults and older children (10- to 12-year-olds) performed equally well on these tasks, reliably picking out the intended meanings for familiar words, non-sense words and pseudo-homonyms alike. Young children (3- to 5-year-olds), on the other hand, could understand the stories where familiar words were used conventionally, and they were reasonably good at inferring the intended meanings of non-sense words from context, but they could not do so for pseudo-homonyms. Instead, they reliably chose the picture illustrating the familiar meaning, even though the story made that meaning quite inappropriate. These results are noteworthy for several reasons. It is significant, first of all, that spontaneous positing of ambiguities did not occur. As long as the known meaning of a word comported with its use in a story, subjects show not the slightest tendency to assign that word a new, secondary meaning—just as one would expect if the acquisition process were semantically conservative. Second, note that performance in the non-sense word condition confirms the familiar finding that young children can acquire the meanings of novel words from context — just as the bootstrapping procedure suggests. Unlike older children and adults, however, these young children are unable to determine the meanings of pseudo-homo-nyms from context, even though they could do so for pseudo-words — exactly what one would expect if young children assumed that words can have one meaning only. Why young children would have such a conservative bias remains controversial. Unfortunately it would take us too far afield to delve into this debate here. Doherty finds evidence that the understanding of ambiguity is strongly correlated with a grasp of synonymy, suggesting that these biases have a common source.” Doherty also finds evidence that the understanding of ambiguity/synonymy is strongly predicted by the ability to reason about false beliefs, suggesting the intriguing hypothesis that young children’s biases are due to their lack of a representational ‘theory of mind’).”  Cf. Grice on transmission of true beliefs in “Meaning, revisited.” – a transcendental argument.Bontly: “Nonetheless, Mazzocco’s results provide empirical evidence for our conjecture that a person will typically posit a second meaning for a known word only when necessary (and, as with young children, not always then). And that, of course, is precisely the sort of process assumption that would make Grice’s “M. O. R.” a reasonable principle for theory choice in semantics. For we have been operating under the assumption that the principal task of linguistic semantics is to describe the competent speaker’s tacit linguistic knowledge. If that knowledge is shaped by a process biased toward semantic parsimony, our semantic theorizing ought surely to be biased in the same direction. Is Pragmatism Vindicated?” That said, the question is still open whether Grice’s “M. O. R.,” understood now developmentally, ontogenetically, and not phylogenetically, as perhaps Millikan would prefer, has such consequences as Gricea typically assumes. In particular, it remains for us to consider whether and, if so, when the above process assumptions favor implicaturum hypotheses over ambiguity hypotheses, and the answer would seem to hang on two further issues. First, there is in each case the question whether a child learning the language will find it necessary to posit a second sense for a given expression. The fact that linguists, apprised as they are of the principles of conversation, find it unnecessary to introduce a second sense for (e.g.) ‘or’ does NOT imply that children would find it unnecessary. For one thing, children might acquire the various uses of ‘or’ well before they have any pragmatic understanding themselves.”Cfr. You can eat the cake or the sandwich.”Bontly: Even if they do not, the order in which the various uses are acquired could make considerable difference.It may be, for instance, that a child who first learned the inclusive use of ‘or’ would have no need to posit a second exclusive sense, whereas a child who originally interpreted ‘or’ exclusively might need eventually to posit an additional, inclusive sense. So we may well have to determine what meaning children first attach to an expression in order to determine whether they would find it necessary to posit a second. The issues raised above are pretty clearly empirical ones, and significant inter-personal differences could complicate matters considerably. Just for the sake of argument, however, let us grant that children do indeed first learn to interpret ‘or’ inclusively, to interpret ‘and’ as mere conjunction, and so on. Let us assume, that is, that the meanings which Grice typically takes to be conventional are just that. In fact, the assumption that weak uses are typically learned first has garnered some empirical support, as one referee brought to my attention. Paris shows that children are less likely than adults to interpret ‘or’ exclusively (see also Sternberg, and Braine and Rumain). More recent experimental work indicates that children first learn to interpret ‘and’ a-temporally (Noveck and Chevaux) and ‘some’ weakly (as compatible with ‘all’) (Noveck, 2001). Even so, it remains an interesting question whether children would posit secondary senses for any of these expressions, and Grice would be on firm ground in arguing that they would not. First, the ‘ambiguities’ discussed at the outset all involve secondary uses which can, with the help of pragmatic principles, be understood in terms of the presumed primary meaning of the expression. If a child, encountering this secondary use for the first time, already knows the primary meaning, and if he has moreover an understanding of the norms of conversation—if he is a ‘Griceian child’ —, he ought to be able to understand the secondary use perfectly well. He can recover the implicaturum and infer the speaker’s meaning from the encoded meaning of the utterance. To the ‘Griceian child,’ therefore, the utterance would not be anomalous. It would make perfect sense in context, giving him no reason to posit a secondary meaning. But what about children who are not yet Griceans — children too young to understand pragmatic principles or to have the conceptual resources to make inferences about other people’s likely communicative intentions? While there seems to be no consensus as to when pragmatic abilities emerge, several considerations suggest that they develop fairly early. Bloom argues that pragmatic understanding is part of the best account of how children learn the meanings of words. Papafragou discusses evidence that children can calculate implicaturums as early as age three. Such children, knowing only the primary meaning of the expression, would be unable to recover the conversational implicaturum and thus unable to grasp the secondary use of the expression via the pragmatic route. Nonetheless, I argue that they would still (at least in most cases) find it unnecessary to posit a second meaning for the expression. Consider: the ‘ambiguities’ at issue all involve secondary meanings which are specificatory, being identical to the primary but for some additional feature making it more restricted or specific. The primary and second meanings would thus be privative, as opposed to polar, opposites; Zwicky and Sadock). What a speaker means when he uses the expression in this secondary way, therefore, would typically imply the proposition he would mean if he were speaking literally (i.e. if he were using the primary meaning of the expression). One could thus say something true using the secondary sense only in contexts where one could say something true using the primary sense—whenever ‘P exclusive-or Q’ is true, so is ‘P inclusive-or Q’; whenever ‘P and-then Q’ is true, so is ‘P and Q’; and so on. Thus even when the intended meaning involves the alleged second sense, the utterance would still come out true if interpreted with the primary sense in mind. And this means, crucially, that the utterance would not seem anomalous, there being no obvious clash between the primary interpretation of the utterance and the conversational context. The utterance may well be pragmatically inappropriate when interpreted this way, but our pre-Gricean child is insensitive to such niceties. Otherwise, he would be already a ‘Gricean’ child. On our account, therefore, the pre-Gricean child still sees no need to posit a second meaning for the expression, even though he could not grasp the intended (specificatory) meaning. We may illustrate the above with the help of an ‘ambiguity’ in the indefinite description (“a dog”) made famous by Grice. A philosopher would ordinarily take an expressions of the form ‘an F’ to be a straightforward existential quantifier, “(Ex)”, as would seem to be the case in ‘I am going to a meeting’ On the other hand, an utterance of ‘I broke a finger’ seems to imply that it is my finger which I broke (unless you are a nurse – I think Horn’s cancellation goes), whereas ‘I saw a dog in the backyard’ would seem to carry the opposite sort of implication — i.e. that it was not my dog which I saw.”Grice finds this delightful ‘reductio’ of the sense-positer: “a” would have _three_ senses!Bontly: “We have then the potential for a three-way ambiguity, but our ruminations on word learning argue against it.”Take a child who has learned (somehow) the weak (existential quantier) use of ‘an F’ (Ex)Fx, but has for some reason never been exposed to strong uses: ‘my,’ ‘not mine.’ Now the child hears his mother say ‘Come look! There is a dog in the backyard!’ Running to the window, the child sees not his mother’s pet dog Fido, but some strange dog, that is not her mother’s. To an adult, this would be entirely predictable.” Using the indefinite description ‘a dog’ (logical form, “(Ex)Dx”) instead of the name for the utterer’s dog would lead one to expect that Fido (the utterer’s dog) is not the dog in question.”Actually, like Ryle, Grice has a shaggy-dog story in WJ5, “That dog is hairy-coated.” “Shaggy, if you must!”. Bontly: “And if the child were of an age to have a rudimentary understanding of the pragmatic aspects of language use, he would make the same prediction and thus see no need here to posit a second ‘sense’ for ‘an F,’ and take ‘not mine’ as an implicaturum.”It’s different with what Grice would have as an ‘established idiom’ (his example, “He’s pushing up the daisies,” but not “He is fertilizing the daffodils”) as one might argue that “I broke a finger” is. Bontly: “The child would not, because the intended, contextually appropriate interpretation would be clear given the primary meaning plus pragmatics, or implicaturum. But even if the child fails to grasp the intended meaning of his mother’s remark, it still seems unlikely that the child would be compelled to posit an ambiguity. No matter what the child’s mother means, there is, after all, a dog in the backyard (“Gotcha! That’s _a_ dog, my Fido is, ain’t it?!”). So the primary interpretation still yields a true proposition. While the ‘pre-Gricean child’ thus misses (part of) the intended meaning of the utterance, still he would not experience a clash between his interpretation and the contextually appropriate interpretation. Perhaps the pre-Gricean child could be forced to see an anomaly. Consider the following example. A parent offers her pre-Gricean child dessert, saying, ‘Ice-cream, or cake?’ When the child helps himself to some of each, the mother removes the cake with a look of annoyance and says:‘I said ice-cream OR cake’.  “While the mother’s behavioural response makes it abundantly clear that the child’s ‘inclusive’ interpretation is inappropriate, there are several reasons why he might still refrain from positing an ambiguity. For one, young children, who are more Griceian (even pre-Griceian) and logical than a few adults, appear to operate under the assumption that a word can have one meaning only, and it may be that pre-Gricean children are simply unable to override this assumption. This would seem particularly likely if Doherty is right that the ability to understand ambiguity requires a robust ‘theory of mind’.At any rate, the position taken here is that recognition of anomaly is necessary for one to posit a second meaning, not that it is sufficient. Contrast this with a similar case where, coming to the window, the child sees no dog but does see (e.g.) a motorcycle, a tree, a bird, and a fence.Then he would have reason to consider an ambiguity, though other explanations might also fit.” “Perhaps Mom was joking or hallucinating.” The claim is, then, that language acquisition works in such a way as to make it unlikely that learners would introduce a second senses for the ‘ambiguities’ in question. Of course, that claim is contingent on a very large assumption — viz., that the meaning which Grice take to be lexically ‘encoded’ is indeed the primary meaning of the expression — and that assumption may be mistaken.” In the continuing debate over Donnellan’s referential/attributive distinction, for instance, Grice takes it as uncontroversial that Russell on ‘the’ provides at least one of the conventional interpretations for sentences of the form ‘The king of France is bald’ (i.e., the attributive interpretation).” Grice’s example in “Vacuous names,” that Bontly quotes,  is “Jones’s butler mixed our coats and hats,” when “Jones’s butler” is actually Jones’s haberdasher dressed as a butler for the occasion.” So Grice distinguishes between THE butler (identificatory) and ‘the’ butler (non-identificatory, whoever he might be). Bontly: From there, they argue that we needn’t posit a secondary (referential) semantics for descriptions since the referential use can be captured by Russell’s theory supplemented by Grice’s pragmatics. Grice, 1969 (Vacuous Names); Kripke, 1977; Neale, 1990). From a developmental perspective, however, the ‘uncontroversial’ assumption that Russell on ‘the’ provides the primary meaning for description phrases is certainly questionable. It being likely that the vast majority of descriptions children hear early in life are used referentially, Grice’s position could conceivably have things exactly backwards— perhaps the referential is primary with the attributive acquired later, either as an additional meaning or a pragmatic extension. Still, the fact, if it is a fact, that a referential use is more common in children’s early environment does not imply that the referential is acquired first.” Exclusive uses of ‘or’ are at least as frequent as inclusive uses, and yet there is a good deal of evidence that the inclusive is developmentally primary. (Paris, Sternberg, Braine and Rumain). Either way, the point remains that plausible assumptions about language acquisition do indeed justify a role for parsimony in semantics. These ‘process’ assumptions may, of course, turn out to be incorrect.” If the evidence points the other way—if it emerges that the learning process posits ambiguities quite freely—then Grice’s “M. O. R.” could conceivably be groundless.”Making it a matter of empirical support or lack thereof, and that was perhaps why Millikan thought that was the wrong way to go? But then if she thought the evolutionary was the right way to go, wouldn’t THAT make Grice’s initially ‘sort of’ analytic pragmatist methodological philosophical decision a matter of fact or lack thereof? Bontly: “Nonetheless, we can see now that the debate between Grice and the conventionalists is ultimately an empirical, rather than, as Grice perhaps thougth, a conceptual one. Choices between pragmatic and semantic accounts may be under-determined by Grice’s intuitions about meaning and use, but they need not be under-determined tout court. Then there’s Tradeoffs, Dead Metaphors, and a Dilemma. The developmental approach to parsimony provides some purchase on the problems regarding tradeoffs and dead metaphors as well. The former problem is that parsimony can be a double-edged sword. While an ambiguity account does multiply senses, the implicaturum account appears to multiply inferential labour. Hearers have to ‘work out’ or ‘calculate’ the utterer’s meaning from the conversational principle, without the benefit of a list of possible meanings as in disambiguation. Pragmatic inference thus seems complex and time-consuming. But the fact is that we are rarely conscious of engaging in any reasoning of the sort Grice requires, pace his Principle of Economy of Rational Effort. Consequently, the claim that communicators actually work through all these complicated inferences seems psychologically unrealistic. To combat these charges, Grice’s response is to claim that implicaturum calculation is largely unconscious and implicit.”Indeed Grice’s principle of economy of rational effort. Bontly: “Background assumptions can be taken for granted, steps can be skipped, and only rarely need the entire process breach the surface of consciousness. This picture seems particularly plausible with a generalised implicaturum as opposed to a particularized one.” When a particular use of an expression E, though unconventional, has become standard or regular (“I broke a finger”? “He’s pushing up the daisies”), the inferential process can be considerably stream-lined; it gets ‘short-circuited’ or ‘compressed by precedent’ (Bach and Harnish). “Bach’s and Harnish’s notion of short-circuited inference is similar to but not quite the same as J. L. Morgan’s notion of short-circuited implicaturum. The latter involves conventions of use (as Searle would put it), to which Bach and Harnish see their account as an alternative. Levinson objects to Bach’s and Harnish’s characterization of default inferences as those compressed by the weight of precedent. A generalised implicaturum, Levinson says, ‘is generative, driven by general heuristics and not dependent on routinization’ But Levinson’s complaint against Bach and Harnish may seem uncharitable. Even on Bach’s and Harnish’s view, where a default inference is that ‘compressed by the weight of precedent’, a generalised implicaturum is still generative: it is still generated by the maxims of conversation. Only the stream-lined character of the inference is dependent on precedent, not the implicaturum itself. If the addressee has calculated the EXCLUSIVE meaning of ‘or’ enough times in the past (from  his mother, we’ll assume) it becomes the default, allowing one to proceed directly to the exclusive interpretation (unless something about the context provides a clue that the standard interpretation would here be inappropriate. Now, the idea that the generalised implicaturum can be the default interpretation, reached without all the fancy inference, provides an obvious reply to the worry about tradeoffs. While it is true that a pragmatic inference, as Grice calls it, in contrast with the ‘logical inference, -- “Retrospective Epilogue” -- are in principle abductive, fairly complex and potentially laborious, familiarity can simplify the process enormously, to the point where it becomes no more difficult than dis-ambiguation.” But the appeal to a default interpretation raises an interesting difficulty that (to my knowledge) Grice never adequately addressed. It is now quite unclear why this default interpretation should be considered an implicaturum rather than an additional sense of the expression.”Because it’s cancellable?Bontly: “To say that it is a default interpretation is, after all, to say that utterers and addressees learn to associate that interpretation with the type of expression in question. The default meaning is known in advance, and all one has to do is be on the lookout for information that could rule it out. “‘Short-circuited’ implicaturum-calculation is thus hard to differentiate from disambiguation, making Grice’s hypothesis look more like a notional variant than a real competitor to the ambiguity hypothesis. Insofar as Grice has considered this problem, his answer appears to be that linguistic meanings, being conventional, are inherently arbitrary.”cf. Bach and Harnish, 1979, pp. 192–195).”Indeed, in his evolutionary take on language, it all starts with Green’s self-expression. You get hit, and you express pain unvoluntarily. Then you proceed to simulate the response in absence of the hit, but the meaning is “I’m in pain.” Finally, you adopt the conventions, arbitrary, and say, ‘pain,’ which is only arbitrarily connected with, well, the pain. It is the last stage that Grice stresses as ‘artificial,’ and ‘arbitrary,’ “non-iconic,” as he retorts to Peirceian terminology he was familiar with since his Oxford days. Bontly: “The exclusive use of ‘or’, on the other hand, is entirely predictable from the conversational principle, so there is nothing arbitrary about it. Thus the exclusive interpretation cannot be part of the encoded meaning, even if it is the default interpretation. Familiarity with that use, in other words, can remove the need to go through the canonical inference, but it does not change the fact that the use has a ‘natural’ (i.e., non-conventional, principled, indeed rational) explanation. It doesn’t change the fact that it is calculable. At this point, however, Grice’s defense of default pragmatic interpretations collides with our remaining issue, the problem of a dead metaphor, such as “He is pushing up the daisies.”” Or as Grice prefers, an ‘established’ or ‘recognised’ ‘idiom.’Bontly: “A metaphor and other conversational implicatura can become conventionalized and ‘die’, turning into new senses. In many such cases the original rationale for the use is long forgotten, but in other cases the dead metaphor remains calculable. A dead metaphors thus pose a nasty, macabre?, dilemma for Grice.”Especially if the implicaturum is “He is dead”!Bontly: “On the one hand, it is tempting to argue that a dead metaphor involves a new conventional meaning precisely because the interpretation in question is no longer actually inferred via Gricean inferences (though one could do so if one had to—if, say, one somehow forgot that the expression had this secondary meaning). If a conversational implicaturum had to be not just calculaBLE but actually calculatED, that would suffice to explain why this one-time, one-off, implicaturum is now semantically significant. But that reply is apparently closed to pragmatists, for then it will be said that the same is true of (e.g.) the exclusive use of ‘or.’ The exclusive interpretation is certainly calculabLE, but since no one actually calculatES it (except in the most unusual of circumstances, as Grice at Harvard!), the implication should be considered semantic, not pragmatic. On the other hand, Grice might maintain that an implicaturum need only be calculabLE and stick by their view that the exclusive reading of ‘or’ is conversationally implicated. But then we shall have to face the consequence that many a dead metaphor (“He is pushing up the daisies”) is likewise calculabLE and thus, according to the present view, ought not to be considered conventional meanings of the expressions in question, which in most cases seems quite wrong.”I’m never sure what Grice means by an ‘established idiom.’ Established by whom? Perhaps he SHOULD consult the dictionary every now and then! Sad the access to OED3 is so expensive!Bontly: What one needs, evidently, is some reason to treat these two types of cases differently.To treat the exclusive use of ‘or’ as an implicaturum (even though it is only rarely calculatED as such) while at the same time to view (e.g.) the once metaphorical use of ‘incense’ (or ‘… pushing up the daisies”) as semantically significant (even though it remains calculabLE).” And the developmental account of parsimony offers just such a reason. On the present view, the reason that the ambiguity account has the burden of proof has to do with the nature of the acquisition, learning, ontogenetical process and specifically with the presumption that language learners will avoid postulating unnecessary senses. But the implicaturum must be calculable by the learner, given his prior understanding of the expression E and his level of pragmatic sophistication.”Grice was a sophisticated. As I think Dora B.-O knows, Moore has been claiming that Grice’s idea that animals cannot mean, because they are not ‘sophisticated’ enough, is an empirical claim, even for Grice!Bontly: “t may be, therefore, that children at the relevant developmental stage have no difficulty understanding the exclusive use of ‘or’ (etc.) as an implicaturum and yet lack the understanding necessary to predict that ‘incense’ could be used to mean to make or become angry, or that to say of someone that he ‘is pushing up the daisies,’ means that, having died and getting buried, the corpse is helping the flowers to grow. The child might not realize, for instance, that ‘incense’ also means an aromatic substance that burns with a pleasant odour, and even those who do probably lack the general background knowledge necessary to appreciate the metaphorical connections between burning and emotion.”Cf. Turner and Fauconnier on ‘blends.’Bontly: Either way, the metaphor would be dead to the child, forcing him to learn that use the same way they learn any arbitrary convention.”It may do to explore ‘established idioms’ in, say, parts of England, which are not so ‘established’ in OTHER parts. Nancy Mitford with his U and non-U distinction may do. “He went to Haddon Hall” invites, for Mitford, the ‘unintended’ implicaturum that the utterer is NOT upper-class. “Surely we drop “hall.’ What else can Haddon be?” But the inference may be lacking for a non-U addressee or utterer. Similarly, in the north of England, “our Mary,” invites the implicaturum of ‘affection,’ and this may go over the head of members of the south-of-England community.Bontly: “The way out of the dilemma, then, is to look to learning.”Alla Kripkenstein?Bontly: To the problem of tradeoffs, Grice can reply that it is better to multiply (if we must use the Occamist verb) inferences – logical inference and pragmatic inference -- than multiply senses because language acquisition is biased in that direction. And Grice may likewise answer the problem of a dead metaphor, or established idiom like, “He’s been pushing up the daisies for some time, now. The reason that Grice’s “M. O. R.” does not mandate an implicaturum account for Grice as well is that such a dead metaphor or established idiom is not calculable by children at the time they learn such expressions, even if they are calculable by some adult speakers.”Is that a fact? I would think that a child is a ‘relentless literalist,’ as Grice called Austin. “Pushing up the daisies?” “I don’t see any daisies!”I think Brigitte Nerlich has a similar example re: irony: MOTHER: What a BEAUTIFUL day! (ironically)CHILD: What do you mean? It’s pouring and nasty. MOTHER: I was being ironic.I don’t think the child is going to posit a second sense to ‘beautiful’ meaning ‘nasty.’Bontly: “For the deciding question in applying Grice’s “M. O. R.” is NOT whether the implicaturum account is available to a philosopher like Grice, but whether it is available to the learner! On this way of carving things up, by the way, some alleged ambiguities which Grice would treat as implicatura could turn out to be semantically significant after all. Likewise, some allegedly dead metaphor may turn out to be very much alive.” Look! He did kick the bucket!” “But he’s PRETENDING to die, dear! Some uses, finally, may vary from utterer to utterer, there being no guarantee that every utterer will have learned the use in the same way. As a conclusion, a better understanding of developmental processes might therefore enlarge our appreciation of the ways in which semantics and pragmatics interact.”Indeed.REFERENCES Atlas, J. D. “Philosophy without Ambiguity.” Oxford: Clarendon Press. E: Wolfson, Oxford. Philosopher. And S. Levinson, “It-clefts, informativeness, and logical form: Radical pragmatics (revised standard version),” in P. Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.Bach, K. “Thought and Reference,” Oxford.“Conversational impliciture,” Mind & Language, 9And R. Harnish, “Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts,” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloom, P. “How Children Learn the Meanings of Words,” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  “Mind-reading, communication and the learning of names for things,” Mind & Language, 17Braine, M. and Rumain, B. “Development of comprehension of ‘or’: evidence for a sequence of developmental competencies,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 31. Davis, S. (ed.) “Pragmatics: A Reader,” Oxford Devitt, M. “The case for referential descriptions,” in M. Reimer/A. Bezuidenhout, “Descriptions and Beyond,” Oxford Doherty, M. “Children’s understanding of homonymy: meta-linguistic awareness and false belief,” Journal of Child Language, 27 Gazdar, G. “Pragmatics: Implicaturum, Presupposition, and Logical Form,” New York: Academic Press. Gleitman, L. “The structural sources of verb meanings,” Language Acquisition, 1Grice, H. P. “Vacuous names,” in D. Davidson and J. Hintikka, Words and Objections. Dordrecht: Reidel. Repr. in part in Ostertag, “Definite descriptions,” MIT.Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, pp. 41–58. Reprinted in Grice, 1989, and Davis, 1991. Grice, P. 1978: Further notes on logic and conversation. In P. Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9, Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, pp. 113–128. Reprinted in Grice, 1989. Presupposition and conversational implicaturum. In P. Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, 183–198. Reprinted in Grice, 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hesse, M. “Simplicity,” in P. Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: MacMillan.Jackendoff, R. “Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution,” Oxford. Kripke, S. “Speaker’s reference and semantic reference,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Repr. in Davis, 1991. Levinson, S. “Pragmatics,” Cambridge.“Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicaturum,” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Markman, E./G. Wachtel, “Childrens’ use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meaning of words,” Cognitive Psychology, 20Mazzocco, M. “Children’s interpretations of homonyms: A developmental study,” Journal of Child Language, 24Morgan, J. L. “Two types of convention in indirect speech acts,” n P. Cole (ed.): Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9, Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, reprinted in Davis, 1991. Newton, I. “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” A. Motte (trans.) and F. Cajori (rev.). Repr. in R. Hutchins (ed.), Great Books of the Western World, vol. 34. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952. Noveck, I. When children are more logical than adults are: Experimental investigations of scalar implicaturum, Cognition, 78, 165–188. And F. Chevaux, “The pragmatic development of and. In A. Ho, S. Fish, and B. Skarabela, Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Papafragou, A. “Mind-reading and verbal communication,” Mind & Language, 17Paris, S. “Comprehension of language connectives and propositional logical relationships,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 16.Peters, A./E. Zaidel, “The acquisition of homonymy. Cognition, 8.Pinker, S. “Language Learnability and Language Development,” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reimer, M. “Donnellan’s distinction/Kripke’s test.” Analysis, 58.Ruhl, C. “On Monosemy: A Study in Linguistic Semantics,” Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Sadock, J. “On testing for conversational implicaturum,” in P. Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9, Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, Repr. in Davis, 1991. Searle, J. R. “Indirect speech acts,” n P. Cole and J. Morgan, Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, Repr. in Davis, 1991. Slobin, D. “Crosslinguistic evidence for a language-making capacity,” n D. Slobin, The Cross-linguistic Study of Language Acquisition, vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Smart, J. “Ockham’s razor,” in J. Fetzer, “Principles of Philosophical Reasoning,” Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Allanheld. Sober, E. “The principle of parsimony,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 32“Reconstructing the Past,” Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.“Let’s razor Ockham’s razor,” in D. Knowles, Explanation and Its Limits. Cambridge.Stalnaker, R. C. “Pragmatic presupposition,” in M. Munitz/P. Unger, “Semantics and Philosophy,” New York: Academic Press, pp. 197–213. Repr. in Davis, 1991. Stampe, D. W. “Attributives and interrogatives,” in M. Munitz/P. Unger, Semantics and Philosophy. New York: Academic Press.Sternberg, R. “Developmental patterns in the encoding and combination of logical connectives,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 28 Van Fraassen, B. “The Scientific Image,” Oxford.Walker, R. C. S. “Conversational implicaturums: a reply to Cohen,” in S. W. Blackburn, Meaning, Reference, and Necessity. Cambridge. Ziff, P. “Semantic Analysis.” Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zwicky, A./J. Sadock, “Ambiguity tests and how to fail them,” in J. Kimball, Syntax and Semantics, vol. 4. New York: Academic Press.Refs: The Grice Papers, BANC, Bancroft.

modus. “The distinction between Judicative and Volitive Interrogatives corresponds with the difference between cases in which a questioner is indicated as being, in one way or another, concerned to obtain information ("Is he at home?"), and cases in which the questioner is indicated as being concerned to settle a problem about what he is to do ("Am I to leave the door open?", "Is the prisoner to be released?", "Shall I go on reading?"). This difference is better represented in Grecian and Roman.”The Greek word was ‘egklisis,’ which Priscian translates as ‘modus’ and defines as ‘inclinatio anima, affectionis demonstrans.’ The Greeks recognised five: horistike, indicativus, pronuntiativus, finitus, or definitivus, prostastike, imperativus, euktike, optativus, hypotaktike (subjunctivus, or conjunnctivus, but also volitivus, hortativus, deliberativus, iussivus, prohibitivus anticipativus ) and aparemphatos infinitivus or infinitus.

modus optativus. optative enclisis (gre: ευκτική έγκλιση, euktike enclisis, hence it may be seen as a modus optatīvus. Something that fascinated Grice. The way an ‘action’ is modalised in the way one describes it. He had learned the basics for Greek and Latin at Oxford, and he was exhilarated to be able to teach now on the subtleties of the English system of ‘aspect.’ To ‘opt’ is to choose. So ‘optativus’ is the deliberative mode. Grice proved the freedom of the will with a “grammatical argument.” ‘Given that the Greeks and the Romans had an optative mode, there is free will.” Romans, having no special verbal forms recognized as Optative, had no need of the designation modus optativus. Yet they sometimes used it, ad imitationem.

modality: Grice: “Modality is the manner in which a proposition (or statement) describes or applies to its subject matter. Derivatively,’ modality’ refers to characteristics of entities or states of affairs described by this or that modal proposition. Modalities are classified as follows. An assertoric proposition is the expression of a mere fact. Alethic modality includes necessity and possibility. The latter two sometimes are referred to respectively as the apodeictic modality and the problematic modality – vide Grice’s category of conversational mode – which covers three categories under what Kant calls the ‘Funktion’ of Mode – the assertoric, the apodeictic and the problematic). Grice takes ‘must’ as basic and defines ‘may’ in terms of ‘must.’ Causal modality includes causal necessity or empirical necessity and causal possibility or empirical possibility. The deontic modality includes obligation and permittedness. Of course this hardly means that ‘must’ is polysemous. It is ‘aequi-vocal’ at most. There is epistemic modality or modalities such as knowing that and doxastic modality (what Grice calls ‘credibility,’ as opposed to ‘desirability’) or modalities ones such as believing that. There is desiderative modality such as ‘willing that’ (what Grice calls ‘desirability’ as prior to ‘credibility.’) Following medieval philosophers, a proposition can be distinguished on the basis of whether the modality is introduced via adverbial modification of the “copula” or verb (“sensus divisus”) – as in Grice’s “Fido is shaggy” versus “Fido may be shaggy” – (in Roman, “Fidus est fidelis” versus “Fidus sit fidelis” – Grice: “Not to be confused with “Fido, sit!” ) or via a modal operator that modifies the proposition (“sensus compositus” – as preferred by Strawson: “It is the case that,” “It is not the case that,” “It must be the case that” and “It may be the case that”). Grice actually calls ‘adverbial modifier’ the external version. The internal version he just calls, as everybody at Clifton does, ‘conjugation’ (“We are not Tarzan!”). Grice: "In Gricese, in the instance in which the indicative occurs after "acsian" here is no doubt in the minds of those who ask the question, the content of the dependent clause being by them regarded as a fact. Mk. X. 2. Da genealsehton him pharisei and hine axodon hwseber alyfS senegum men his wif forlsetan. Interrogabant eum: INTERROGABANT EUM: SI LICET Si licet. L. XII. 36. beo gelice pam mannum be hyra hlaforde abidafr hwsenne he sy fram gyftum gecyrred. L. XXII. 24. hi flitun betwux him hwylc hyra wsere yldest. J. XIX. 24. uton hleotan hwylces ures heo sy. Mk. XV. 24. hi hlotu wurpon, hwset gehwa name. mittentes  sortem super eis, quis quid tolleret. MITTENTES SORTEM SVPER EIS, QVIS QVID TOLLERET. M. XXVII. 49. Uton geseon hwseber Helias cume and wylle  hyne alysan. Mk. V. 14. hi ut eodon bset hi gesawon hwset par gedon wsere. L. XIX. 3.he wolde geseon hwylc se hselend wsere. Mk. IX. 34.hi on wege smeadon hwylc hyra yldost wsere. Mk. IX. 10. L. XI, 38. XXII. 23. L. XIV. 28. Hwylc eower wyle timbrian anne stypel, hu ne sytt he serest and teleS pa andfengas be him behefe synt, hwseder he hsebbe hine to full-fremmenne? L. I. 29. ba wearS heo on his sprsece gedrefed, and pohte hwset seo greting wsere. L. Ill, 15. XIV. 31. L. IX. 46. bset gepanc eode on hig, hwylc hyra yldest wsere. Mk. XV. 47. Da com Maria Magdalene and Josepes Maria, and beheoldon hwar he geled wsere. aspiciebant. ubi poneretur ASPICIEBANT. VBI PONERETVR. (Looked around, in order to discover). The notion of purpose is sometimes involved, the indirect question having something of the force of a final clause: Mk. XIII. 11. ne foresmeage ge hwset ge specan. L. XXI. 14.  *) Direct rather than indirect question. L. XII. 22. ne beo ge ymbehydige eowre sawle hwset ge etan, ne eowrum lichaman hwset ge scrydun. M. VI, 25. L. XII. 11. ne beo ge embebencynde hu oSSe hwset ge specon oSSe andswarian. M. X. 19. ne bence ge hu oSSe hwset ge sprecun. L. XII. 29. Nelle ge secean hwset ge eton oSSe drincon.  J. XIX. 12. and sySSan sohte Pilatus hu he hyne forlete. quaerebat Pilatus dimittere eum. QVAEREBAT PILATVS DIMITTERE EVM  2. When the content of the dependent clause is regarded as an actual fact, which is the case when the leading verb expresses the act of learning, perceiving, etc., the indicative is used. M. VI. 28. BesceawiaS secyres Man hu hig weaxaO. M. XXI. 16.gehyrst bu hwset pas cwseoab? M. XXVII. 13. Ne gehyrst Jm hu fela sagena hig ongen be  secgeaS? L. XVIII. 6. M. IX. 13.leornigeab hwset is, ic wylle mildheortnesse nses  onssegdnesse. M. XXI. 20. loca nu hu hrsedlice bset fic-treow forscranc. Mk. XV. 4. loca hu mycelum hi be wregea§. M. XII. 4.Ne rsedde ge hwset David dyde hu he ineode on Godes hus, and set ba offring-hlafas? L. VI, 4. Mk. XII. 26. Be bam deadum ■ bset hi arison, ne rsedde ge on Moyses bec hu God to him cwseb? Mk. I, 26. Mk. V. 16. hi rehton him ba Se hit gesawon hu hit gedon  wses. L. VIII. 36. Da cyddon him ba Se gesawon hu he wses hal geworden. L. XXIII. 55.hig gesawon ba byrgene and hu his lichama aled wses.  J. XX. 14.heo geseah hwar se hselend stod. Vidit Jesum stantem.  *) VIDIT IESVM STANTEM. Not the endeavour to learn, perceive, which would require the SUBJUNCTIVE.  L. XXIV. 6. gebencao hu he spsec wiS eow. recordamini. Mk. VIII. 19.  3.After verbs of knowing both the indicative and subjunctive are used, usually the indicative. See general statement before § 2.  a) Indicative:*) L. XIII. 27. Ne cann ic hwanon ge synt. Mk. XIV, 68.  M. VI. 8. eower fseder wat hwset eow bearf ys.  M. XX. 22. Gyt nyton hwset gyt biddab.  L. XIII. 25. nat ic hwanon ge synt.   J. IX. 21. we nyton humete he nu gesyhb. quomodo autem  nunc videat, nescimus. QVOMODO AVTEM NVNC, NESCIMVS.  J. IX. 25. gif he synful is, bset ic nat.  si peccator est, nescio. SI PECCATOR EST, NESCIO. I know not if he is a sinner. gif he synful is, bset ic nat. "Gif he synful is, ᚦaet ic nat." In Oxonian: "If he sinful is, that I know not. M. XXVI. 70. Mk. IX. 6. X, 28. XIII, 33, 35. L. IX, 33.  XX, 7. XXII, 60. L. XXIII. 34. J. II. 9. III. 8. V. 13. VII.  27, 27, 28. VIII. 14, 14. J. IX. 29. 30. X. 6. XIII. 18.  XIV. 5. XV. 15.  b) Indicative and subjunctive: L. X. 22. nan man nat hwylc IS se sunu buton se fseder, ne hwylc SI Se fseder buton se sunu. -- In Latin, both times have subjunctive third person singular, "sit".)  c) Subjunctive.  a. In the protasis of a conditional sentence: J. VII. 51.Cwyst bu demS ure se senine man buton hyne man ser gehyre and wite hwset he do? J. XI. 57. pa pharisei hsefdon beboden gif hwa wiste hwaer he wsere paet he hyt cydde bset hig mihton hine niman. Translating the Latin subjunctive in 21 instances, the indic. in 9. As a rule, the mood (or mode, as Grice prefers) of the Latin (or Roman, as Grice prefers) verb does not determine the O. E. (or A. S., as Grice prefers) usage. In Anglo-Saxon, Oxonian, and Gricese, "si" seems to be no more than a literal (mimetic) rendering of Roman "sit," the correct third person singular subjunctive.  Ms. A. reads "ys" with'-sy" above. The Lind. gloss reads "is".  M. XXIV. 43. WitaS bset gyf se hiredes ealdor wiste on hwylcere tide se beof towerd waere witodlice he wolde wacigean. si sciret paterfamilias qua hora fur venturus esset vigilaret, (Cf. J. IV, 10. Gif bu wistest — hwaet se is etc.  Si scirest quis est. SI SCIREST QVIS EST.  /J. In the apodosis of a conditional sentence:  J. VII. 17. gyf hwa wyle his willan don he gecwemo (sic.  A.B.C. gecnsewS) be bsere lare hwseber heo si of Gode  hwseber be ic he me sylfum spece. L. VII. 39.  Gyf be man witega wsere witodlice he wiste hwset and hwylc bis wif wsere be his sethrinb bset heo synful  is. sciret utique quae et qualis est mulier. SCIRET VTIQVE QVAE ET QVALIS EST MULIER. y. After a hortatory subjunctive. M. VI. 3. Nyte bin wynstre hwset do bin swybre.  4. After verbs of saying and declaring. a) Here the indicative is used when the dependent clause contains a statement rather than a question. L. VIII. 39. cyS hu mycel be God gedon h3efS.  L. VIII. 47.Da bset wif geseah bset hit him nses dyrne heo com forht and astrehte hig to his fotum and geswutulude beforan eallum folce for hwylcum binge heo hit sethran and hu heo wearS sona hal. ob quam causam tetigerit eum, indicavit; et quemadmodum confestim SANATA SIT.  Further examples of the indicative are. L. XX. 2.*) Sege us on hwylcum anwalde wyrcst bu Sas bing  oSSe hwset ys se Se be bisne anwald sealde. L. VI. 47.  iElc bara be to me cymb and mine sprseca gehyi*S  and pa deb, ic him setywe hwam he gelic is.  b) When the subordinate clause refers to the future both the indicative and subjunctive are used:  *) Direct question, as the order of the words shows. Mk. XIII. 4. Sege us hwsenne bas bing gewurdon (A. geweorSon, H. gewurSen, R. gewurdon)  and hwylc tacen bid bsenne ealle bas Sing onginnaS beon geendud. (Transition to direct question.) Dic nobis, quando ista fient?  DIC NOBIS, QVANDO ISTA FIENT? et quod signum erit?  ET QVOD SIGNVM ERIT? M. XXIV. 3. Sege us hwsenne bas Sing gewurbun and hwile tacn si bines to-cymes.  J. XVIII. 32. he geswutelode hwylcon deaSe lie swulte. qua morte ESSET moriturus.   c) When the question presents a distinct alternative, so that the idea of doubt and uncertainty is prominent, the subjunctive in Gricese, Oxonian, and Anglo-Saxon, qua conjugated version, is used:  M. XXVI. 63. Ic halsige be Surh bone lyfiendan God, b*t Su secge us gyf \>u sy Crist Godes sunu. L. XXII. 67. J. X. 24. d) The following is hortatory as well as declarative:  L. XII. 5. Ic eow setywe hwsene ge ondredon. Ostendam autem vobis, quem TIMEATIS.  5. In three indirect questions which in the original are direct, the subjunctive is used:  M. XXIV. 45.Wens (sic. A. H. & R. wenst) \>u hwa sy getrywe and gleaw BEOW? Quis, putas, EST fidelis servus?  QVIS, PVTAS, EST FIDELIS SERVS. M. XXVI. 25. Cwyst bu lareow hwseSer ic hyt si? Numquid ego sum?  NVMQVID EGO SVM, J. VII. 26. CweSe we hwseber ba ealdras ongyton ^set bis IS Crist? Numquid vere cognoverunt principes, quia hie EST Christus?  § 11. RELATIVE CLAUSES. Except in the relations discussed in the following the indicative is used in relative clauses. Grice: "The verb 'to be' is actually composed of three different stems -- not only in Aristotle, but in Gricese." CONIUGATVM, persona, s-stem (cognate with Roman "sit"), b-stem, w-stem (cognate with Roman, "ero") MODVS INFINITVUM, the verb "sīn,” the verb "bion,” the verb "wesan.” MODVS INDICATIVM PRAESENS prima singularis: "ik" -- Oxonian "I" "em" Oxonian, "am." Bium wisu secunda singularis: "thū" -- Oxonian: "thou" "art" Oxonian "art" bis(t) wisis tertia singularis: "hē" Oxonian, 'he' "ist" (Cognate with Roman "est") Oxonian 'is' *bid wis(id) prima, secunda, tertia, pluralis "sindun" *biod wesad MODVS INDCATIVVM PRAETERITVM prima singularis "was" Oxonian: "was."  seconda singularis ""wāri" Oxonian "were" tertia singularis "was" Oxonian "was" prima, secunda, tertia, pluralis "wārun" Oxonian "were" MODVS  SVBIVCTIVVM PRAESENS prima, secunda, tertia, singularis "sīe" (Lost in Oxonian after Occam) "wese" (cognate with "was", and Roman, "erat") prima, secunda, tertia, pluralis "sīen" wesen MODVS  SVBIVNCTIVVM PRAETERITUM  prima, secunda, tertia, singularis wāri prima, secunda, tertia, pluralis wārin MODVS IMPERATIVUM singularis  "wis," "wes" (Cognate with "was" and Roman "erat") pluralis wesad MODVS PARTICIPIVM PRAESENT wesandi (cognate with Cicero's "essens" and "essentia" MODVS PARTICIPIVM PRAETERITVM "giwesan"   The present-tense forms of 'be' with the w-stem, "wesan" are almost never used.     Therefore, wesan is used as IMPERATIVE, in the past tense, and in the participium prasesens versions of     "sīn" -- Grice: "I rue the day when the Bosworth and Toller left Austin!" -- "Now the OED, is not supposed to include Anglo-Saxon forms!") and does not have a separate meaning. The b-stem is only met in the present indicative of wesan, and only for the first and second persons in the singular.    So we see that if Roman had the 'est-sit" distinction, the Oxonians had "The 'ist'/"sīe"/"wese" tryad).     Grice: "To simplify the Oxonian forms and make them correlative to Roman, I shall reduce the Oxonian triad,  'ist'/'sīe'/"wese" to the division actually cognate with Roman:  'ist'/'sīe."   And so, I shall speak of  the 'ist'/'sīe" distinction, or the 'est-sit' distinction interchangeably." Today many deny the distinction or confine attention just to modal operators. Modal operators in non-assertoric propositions are said to produce referential opacity or oblique contexts in which truth is not preserved under substitution of extensionally equivalent expressions. Modal and deontic logics provide formal analyses of various modalities. Intensional logics investigate the logic of oblique contexts. Modal logicians have produced possible worlds semantics interpretations wherein propositions MP with modal operator M are true provided P is true in all suitable (e.g., logically possible, causally possible, morally permissible, rationally acceptable) possible worlds. Modal realism grants ontological status to possible worlds other than the actual world or otherwise commits to objective modalities in nature or reality.

modus: the study of the logic of the operators ‘it is possible that’ (or, as Grice prefers, “it may be that”) and ‘it is necessary that’ (or as Grice prefers, “It must be that…”). For some reason, Grice used ‘mode’ at Oxford – but ‘manner’ in the New World! The sad thing is that when he came back to the Old World, to the puzzlmenet of Old-Worlders, he kept using ‘manner.’ So, everytime we see Grice using ‘manner,’ we need to translate to either the traditional Oxonian ‘modus,’ or the Gricese ‘mode.’ These operators Grice symbolizes by a diamond and a square respectively. and each can be defined in terms of the other. □p (necessarily p) is equivalent to ¬◇¬p ("not possible that not-p") ◇p (possibly p) is equivalent to ¬□¬p ("not necessarily not-p"). To say that Fido may be shaggy is to say that it is not necessarily false. Thus possP could be regarded as an abbreviation of -Nec-p Equally, to say that Fido *must* be shaggy is to deny that its negation is possible. Thus Af could be regarded as an abbreviation of -B-f. Grice prefers to take ‘poss” as primitive (“for surely, it may rain before it must pour!”). Grice’s ystem G of modality is obtained by introducing Poss. and Nec. If system, as Grice’s is, is classical/intuitionist/minimal, so is the corresponding modal logic. Grice surely concentrates on the classical case (“Dummett is overconcentraating on the intuitionist, and nobody at Oxford was, is, or will be minimal!”).  As with any kind of logic, there are three components to a system of modal logic: a syntactics, which determines the system or calculus + and the notion of well-formed formula (wff). Second, a semantics, which determines the consequence relation X on +-wffs. Third, a pragmatics or sub-system of inference, which determines the deductive consequence relation Y on +-wffs. The syntactis of the modal operators is the same in every system. Briefly, the modal operator is a one-place or unary ‘connective,’ or operator, strictly, since it does not connect two atoms into a molecule, like negation. There are many different systems of modal logic, some of which can be generated by different ways of setting up the semantics. Each of the familiar ways of doing this can be associated with a sound and complete system of inference. Alternatively, a system of inference can be laid down first and we can search for a semantics for it relative to which it is sound and complete. Grice gives primacy to the syntactic viewpoint. Semantic consequence is defined in modal logic in the usual classical way: a set of sentences 9 yields a sentence s, 9 X s, iff if no “interpretation” (to use Grice’s jargon in “Vacuous Names”) I makes all members of 9 true and s false. The question is how to extend the notion of “interpretation” to accommodate for “may be shaggy” – and “must be shaggy”. In classical sentential logic, an interpretation is an assignment to each sentence letter of exactly one of the two truth-values = and where n % m ! 1. So to determine relative possibility in a model, we identify R with a collection of pairs of the form where each of u and v is in W. If a pair is in R, v is possible relative to u, and if is not in R, v is impossible relative to u. The relative possibility relation then enters into the rules for the evaluating modal operator. We do not want to say, e. g. that at the actual world, it is possible for Grice to originate from a different sperm and egg, since the only worlds where this takes place are impossible relative to the actual world. So we have the rule that B f is true at a world u if f is true at some world v such that v is possible relative to u. Similarly, Af is true at a world u if f is true at every world v which is possible relative to u. R may have simple first-order properties such as reflexivity, (Ex)Rxx, symmetry, (Ex)(Ey)(Rxy P Ryx), and transitivity, (Ex)(Ey)(Ez)((Rxy & Ryz) P Rxz), and different modal systems can be obtained by imposing different combinations of these on R (other systems can be obtained from higher-order constraints). The least constrained system is the system Ghp, in which no structural properties are put on R. In G-hp we have B (B & C) X B B, since if B (B & C) holds at w* then (B & C) holds at some world w possible relative to w*, and thus by the truth-function for &, B holds at w as well, so B B holds at w*. Hence any interpretation that makes B (B & C) true (% true at w*) also makes B B true. Since there are no restrictions on R in G-hp, we can expect B (B & C) X B B in every system of modal logic generated by constraining R. However, for G-hp we also have C Z B C. For suppose C holds at w*. B C holds at w* only if there is some world possible relative to w* where C holds. But there need be no such world. In particular, since R need not be reflexive, w* itself need not be possible relative to w*. Concomitantly, in any system for which we stipulate a reflexive R, we will have C X B C. The simplest such system is known as T, which has the same semantics as K except that R is stipulated to be reflexive in every interpretation. In other systems, further or different constraints are put on R. For example, in the system B, each interpretation must have an R that is reflexive and symmetric, and in the system S4, each interpretation must have an R that is reflexive and transitive. In B we have B C Z B B C, as can be shown by an interpretation with nontransitive R, while in S4 we have B AC Z C, as can be shown by an interpretation with non-symmetric R. Correspondingly, in S4, B C X B B C, and in B, B AC X C. The system in which R is reflexive, transitive, and symmetric is called S5, and in this system, R can be omitted. For if R has all three properties, R is an equivalence relation, i.e., it partitions W into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive equivalence classes. If Cu is the equivalence class to which u belongs, then the truth-value of a formula at u is independent of the truth-values of sentence letters at worlds not in Cu, so only the worlds in Cw* are relevant to the truth-values of sentences in an S5 interpretation. But within Cw* R is universal: every world is possible relative to every other. Consequently, in an S5 interpretation, we need not specify a relative possibility relation, and the evaluation rules for B and A need not mention relative possibility; e.g., we can say that B f is true at a world u if there is at least one world v at which f is true. Note that by the characteristics of R, whenever 9 X s in K, T, B, or S4, then 9 X s in S5: the other systems are contained in S5. K is contained in all the systems we have mentioned, while T is contained in B and S4, neither of which is contained in the other. Sentential modal logics give rise to quantified modal logics, of which quantified S5 is the bestknown. Just as, in the sentential case, each world in an interpretation is associated with a valuation of sentence letters as in non-modal sentential logic, so in quantified modal logic, each world is associated with a valuation of the sort familiar in non-modal first-order logic. More specifically, in quantified S5, each world w is assigned a domain Dw – the things that exist at w – such that at least one Dw is non-empty, and each atomic n-place predicate of the language is assigned an extension Extw of n-tuples of objects that satisfy the predicate at w. So even restricting ourselves to just the one first-order extension of a sentential system, S5, various degrees of freedom are already evident. We discuss the following: (a) variability of domains, (b) interpretation of quantifiers, and (c) predication. (a) Should all worlds have the same domain or may the domains of different worlds be different? The latter appears to be the more natural choice; e.g., if neither of of Dw* and Du are subsets of the other, this represents the intuitive idea that some things that exist might not have, and that there could have been things that do not actually exist (though formulating this latter claim requires adding an operator for ‘actually’ to the language). So we should distinguish two versions of S5, one with constant domains, S5C, and the other with variable domains, S5V. (b) Should the truth of (Dn)f at a world w require that f is true at w of some object in Dw or merely of some object in D (D is the domain of all possible objects, 4weWDw)? The former treatment is called the actualist reading of the quantifiers, the latter, the possibilist reading. In S5C there is no real choice, since for any w, D % Dw, but the issue is live in S5V. (c) Should we require that for any n-place atomic predicate F, an n-tuple of objects satisfies F at w only if every member of the n-tuple belongs to Dw, i.e., should we require that atomic predicates be existence-entailing? If we abbreviate (Dy) (y % x) by Ex (for ‘x exists’), then in S5C, A(Ex)AEx is logically valid on the actualist reading of E (%-D-) and on the possibilist. On the former, the formula says that at each world, anything that exists at that world exists at every world, which is true; while on the latter, using the definition of ‘Ex’, it says that at each world, anything that exists at some world or other is such that at every world, it exists at some world or other, which is also true; indeed, the formula stays valid in S5C with possibilist quantifiers even if we make E a primitive logical constant, stipulated to be true at every w of exactly the things that exist at w. But in S5V with actualist quantifiers, A(Ex)AEx is invalid, as is (Ex)AEx – consider an interpretation where for some u, Du is a proper subset of Dw*. However, in S5V with possibilist quantifiers, the status of the formula, if ‘Ex’ is defined, depends on whether identity is existence-entailing. If it is existenceentailing, then A(Ex)AEx is invalid, since an object in D satisfies (Dy)(y % x) at w only if that object exists at w, while if identity is not existence-entailing, the formula is valid. The interaction of the various options is also evident in the evaluation of two well-known schemata: the Barcan formula, B (Dx)fx P (Dx) B fx; and its converse, (Dx) B fx P B (Dx)fx. In S5C with ‘Ex’ either defined or primitive, both schemata are valid, but in S5V with actualist quantifiers, they both fail. For the latter case, if we substitute -E for f in the converse Barcan formula we get a conditional whose antecedent holds at w* if there is u with Du a proper subset of Dw*, but whose consequent is logically false. The Barcan formula fails when there is a world u with Du not a subset of Dw*, and the condition f is true of some non-actual object at u and not of any actual object there. For then B (Dx)f holds at w* while (Dx) B fx fails there. However, if we require atomic predicates to be existence-entailing, then instances of the converse Barcan formula with f atomic are valid. In S5V with possibilist quantifiers, all instances of both schemata are valid, since the prefixes (Dx) B and B (Dx) correspond to (Dx) (Dw) and (Dw) (Dx), which are equivalent (with actualist quantifiers, the prefixes correspond to (Dx 1 Dw*), and (Dw) (Dx 1 Dw) which are non-equivalent if Dw and Dw* need not be the same set). Finally in S5V with actualist quantifiers, the standard quantifier introduction and elimination rules must be adjusted. Suppose c is a name for an object that does not actually exist; then - Ec is true but (Dx) - Ex is false. The quantifier rules must be those of free logic: we require Ec & fc before we infer (Dv)fv and Ec P fc, as well as the usual EI restrictions, before we infer (Ev)fv. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Modality: Desirability and Credibility;” H. P. Grice, “The may and the may not;” H. P. Grice, “The Big Philosophical Mistake: ‘What is actual is not also possible’.”

modus: Grice: “In Roman, ‘modus’ may have been rendered as ‘way’, ‘fashion’ – but I will not, and use ‘modus’ as THEY did! ‘Modus’ is used in more than one ‘modus’ in philosophy. In Ariskantian logic, ‘modus’ refers either to the arrangement of universal, particular, affirmative, or negative propositions within a syllogism, only certain of which are valid this is often tr., confusingly, as ‘modus’ in English – “the valid modes, such as Barbara and Celarent.” But then ‘modus’ may be used to to the property a proposition has by virtue of which it is necessary or contingent, possible or impossible, or ‘actual.’ In Oxonian scholastic metaphysics, ‘modus’ is often used in a not altogether technical way to mean that which characterizes a thing and distinguishes it from others. Micraelius, in his best-selling “Lexicon philosophicum,” has it that “a mode does not compose a thing, but distinguishes it and makes it determinate.” ‘Modus’ is also used in the context of the modal distinction in the theory of distinctions to designate the distinction that holds between a substance and its modes or between two modes of a single substance. ‘Modus’ also appears in the technical vocabulary of medieval speculative ‘grammar’ or ‘semantics’ (“speculative semantics” makes more sense) -- in connection with the notions of the “modus significandi,” “the modus intelligendi” (more or less the same thing), and the “modus essendi.” The term ‘modus’ becomes especially important when Descartes (vide Grice, “Descartes on clear and distinct perception”), Spinoza (vide S. N. Hampshire, “Spinoza”), and Locke each take it up, giving it three somewhat different special meanings within their respective systems. Descartes (vide Grice, “Descartes on clear and distinct perception”) makes ‘modus’ a central notion in his metaphysics in his Principia philosophiae. For Descartes, each substantia is characterized by a principal attribute, ‘cogitatio’ for ‘anima’ and ‘extensio’ for ‘corpus’. Modes, then, are particular ways of being extended or thinking, i.e., particular sizes, shapes, etc., or particular thoughts, properties in the broad sense that individual things substances have. In this way, ‘modus’ occupies the role in Descartes’s philosophy that ‘accident’ does in Aristotelian philosophy. But for Descartes, each mode must be connected with the principal attribute of a substance, a way of being extended or a way of thinking, whereas for the Aristotelian, accidents may or may not be connected with the essence of the substance in which they inhere. Like Descartes, Spinoza recognizes three basic metaphysical terms, ‘substania,’ ‘attributum’, and ‘modus’. Recalling Descartes, Spinoza defines ‘modus’ as “the affections of a substance, or that which is in another, and which is also conceived through another” Ethics I. But for Spinoza, there is only one substance, which has all possible attributes. This makes it somewhat difficult to determine exactly what Spinoza means by ‘modus’, whether they are to be construed as being in some say a “property” of God, the one infinite substance, or whether they are to be construed more broadly as simply individual things that depend for their existence on God, just as Cartesian modes depend on Cartesian substance. Spinoza also introduces somewhat obscure distinctions between modus infinitus and modus finitus, and between immediate and mediate infinite modes. Now, much closer to Grice, Englishman and Oxonian Locke uses ‘mode’ in a way that evidently derives from Descartes’s usage, but that also differs from it. For Locke, a ‘modus’ is “such complex idea – as Pegasus the flying horse --, which however compounded, contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves, but are considered as Dependences on, or Affections of Substances” Essay II. A ‘modus,’ for Locke, is thus an idea that represents to us the a ‘complex’ propertiy of a thing, sc. an idea derived from what Locke a ‘simple’ idea that come to us from experience. Locke distinguishes between a ‘modus simplex,’ like number, space, and infinity, which are supposed to be constructed by compounding the SAME simple idea many times, and ‘modus complexum,’ or ‘modus mixtum,’ a mode like obligation or theft, which is supposed to be compounded of at least two simple ideas of a different sort.  Refs.: Grice applies Locke’s idea of the modus mixtum in his ‘labour’ against Empiricism, cf. H. P. Grice, “I may care a hoot what the dictionary says, but it is not the case that I care a hoot what Micraelius’s “Lexicon philosophicum” says.”

Grice against a pragmatic or rational module: from Latin ‘modulus,’ ‘little mode.’  the commitment to functionally independent and specialized cognitive system in psychological organizatio, or, more generally, in the organization of any complex system. A ‘modulus’ entails that behavior is the product of components with subordinate functions, that these functions are realized in discrete physical systems, and that the subsystems are minimally interactive. Organization in terms of a modulus varies from simple decomposability to what Herbert Simon calls near decomposability. In the former, component systems are independent, operating according to intrinsically determined principles; system behavior is an additive or aggregative function of these independent contributions. In the latter, the short-run behavior of components is independent of the behavior of other components; the system behavior is a relatively simple function of component contributions. Gall defends a modular organization for the mind/brain, holding that the cerebral hemispheres consist of a variety of organs, or centers, each subserving specific intellectual and moral functions. This picture of the brain as a collection of relatively independent organs contrasts sharply with the traditional view that intellectual activity involves the exercise of a general unitary ‘faculty’ in a variety of this or that‘domain’, where a ‘domain’ is not a ‘modulus’ -- a view that was common to Descartes and Hume as well as Gall’s major opponents such as Flourens. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Bouillaud and Broca (a French doctor, of Occitan ancestry – brooch, broca – thorn --) defended the view that language is controlled by localized structures in the left hemisphere and is relatively independent of other cognitive activities. It was later discovered by Wernicke that there are at least two centers for the control of language, one more posterior and one more anterior. On these views, there are discrete physical structures responsible for communication, which are largely independent of one another and of structures responsible for other psychological functions. This is therefore a modular organization. This view of the neurophysiological organization of communication continues to have advocates, though the precise characterization of the functions these two centers serve is controversial. Many more recent views have tended to limit modularity to more peripheral functions such as vision, hearing, and motor control and speech, but have excluded “what I am interested in, viz. so-called higher cognitive processes.” – H. P. Grice, “The power structure of the soul.”

modus ponendo ponens: 1 the argument form ‘If A then B; A; therefore, B’, and arguments of this form compare fallacy of affirming the consequent; 2 the rule of inference that permits one to infer the consequent of a conditional from that conditional and its antecedent. This is also known as the rule of /-elimination or rule of /- detachment. 

modus tollendo tollens: 1 the argument form ‘If A then B; not-B; therefore, not-A’, and arguments of this form compare fallacy of denying the antecedent; 2 the rule of inference that permits one to infer the negation of the antecedent of a conditional from that conditional and the negation of its consequent. 

Molina, L. de 15351600,  Jesuit theologian and philosopher. He studied and taught at Coimbra and Évora and also taught in Lisbon and Madrid. His most important works are the Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis“Free Will and Grace,” 1588, Commentaria in primam divi Thomae partem “Commentary on the First Part of Thomas’s Summa,” 1592, and De justitia et jure “On Justice and Law,” 15921613. Molina is best known for his doctrine of middle knowledge scientia media. Its aim was to preserve free will while maintaining the Christian doctrine of the efficacy of divine grace. It was opposed by Thomists such as Bañez, who maintained that God exercises physical predetermination over secondary causes of human action and, thus, that grace is intrinsically efficacious and independent of human will and merits. For Molina, although God has foreknowledge of what human beings will choose to do, neither that knowledge nor God’s grace determine human will; the cooperation concursus of divine grace with human will does not determine the will to a particular action. This is made possible by God’s middle knowledge, which is a knowledge in between the knowledge God has of what existed, exists, and will exist, and the knowledge God has of what has not existed, does not exist, and will not exist. Middle knowledge is God’s knowledge of conditional future contingent events, namely, of what persons would do under any possible set of circumstances. Thanks to this knowledge, God can arrange for certain human acts to occur by prearranging the circumstances surrounding the choice without determining the human will. Thus, God’s grace is concurrent with the act of the will and does not predetermine it, rendering the Thomistic distinction between sufficient and efficacious grace superfluous. 

molyneux question: also called Molyneux’s problem, the question that, in correspondence with Locke, William Molyneux or Molineux, 1656 98, a Dublin lawyer and member of the Irish Parliament, posed and Locke inserted in the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1694; book 2, chap. 9, section 8: Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t’other, which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to see. Quære, Whether by his sight, before he touch’d them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube. Although it is tempting to regard Molyneux’s question as straightforwardly empirical, attempts to gauge the abilities of newly sighted adults have yielded disappointing and ambiguous results. More interesting, perhaps, is the way in which different theories of perception answer the question. Thus, according to Locke, sensory modalities constitute discrete perceptual channels, the contents of which perceivers must learn to correlate. Such a theory answers the question in the negative as did Molyneux himself. Other theories encourage different responses. 

Mondolfo: essential Italian philosopher. Like Grice, Mondolfo believed seriously in the longitudinal unity of philosophy and made original research on the historiography of philosophy, especially during the Eleatic, Agrigento, and later Roman periods. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice, Mondolfo, e la filosofia greco-romana," per il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

Montaigne: philosopher who set forth the Renaissance version of Grecian scepticism. Born and raised in Bordeaux, he became its mayor, and was an adviser to leaders of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In 1568 he tr. the work of the  rationalist theologian Raimund Sebond on natural theology. Shortly thereafter he began writing essais, attempts, as the author said, to paint himself. These, the first in this genre, are rambling, curious discussions of various topics, suggesting tolerance and an undogmatic Stoic morality. The longest essai, the “Apology for Raimund Sebond,” “defends” Sebond’s rationalism by arguing that since no adequate reasons or evidence could be given to support any point of view in theology, philosophy, or science, one should not blame Sebond for his views. Montaigne then presents and develops the skeptical arguments found in Sextus Empiricus and Cicero. Montaigne related skeptical points to thencurrent findings and problems. Data of explorers, he argues, reinforce the cultural and ethical relativism of the ancient Skeptics. Disagreements between Scholastics, Platonists, and Renaissance naturalists on almost everything cast doubt on whether any theory is correct. Scientists like Copernicus and Paracelsus contradict previous scientists, and will probably be contradicted by future ones. Montaigne then offers the more theoretical objections of the Skeptics, about the unreliability of sense experience and reasoning and our inability to find an unquestionable criterion of true knowledge. Trying to know reality is like trying to clutch water. What should we then do? Montaigne advocates suspending judgment on all theories that go beyond experience, accepting experience undogmatically, living according to the dictates of nature, and following the rules and customs of one’s society. Therefore one should remain in the religion in which one was born, and accept only those principles that God chooses to reveal to us. Montaigne’s skepticism greatly influenced European thinkers in undermining confidence in previous theories and forcing them to seek new ways of grounding knowledge. His acceptance of religion on custom and faith provided a way of living with total skepticism. His presentation of skepticism in a modern language shaped the vocabulary and the problems of philosophy in modern times. 

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

Montanism, a charismatic, schismatic movement in early Christianity, originating in Phrygia in the late second century. It rebuked the mainstream church for laxity and apathy, and taught moral purity, new, i.e. postbiblical, revelation, and the imminent end of the world. Traditional accounts, deriving from critics of the movement, contain exaggerations and probably some fabrications. Montanus himself, abetted by the prophetesses Maximilla and Prisca, announced in ecstatic speech a new, final age of prophecy. This fulfilled the biblical promises that in the last days the Holy Spirit would be poured out universally Joel 2: 28ff.; Acts 2: 16ff. and would teach “the whole truth” Jon. 14:26; 16:13. It also empowered the Montanists to enjoin more rigorous discipline than that required by Jesus. The sect denied that forgiveness through baptism covered serious subsequent sin; forbade remarriage for widows and widowers; practiced fasting; and condemned believers who evaded persecution. Some later followers may have identified Montanus with the Holy Spirit itself, though he claimed only to be the Spirit’s mouthpiece. The “new prophecy” flourished for a generation, especially in North Africa, gaining a famous convert in Tertullian. But the church’s bishops repudiated the movement’s criticisms and innovations, and turned more resolutely against postapostolic revelation, apocalyptic expectation, and ascetic extremes.

Montesquieu, philosopher of the Enlightenment. He was born at La Brède, educated at the Oratorian Collège de Juilly and received law degrees from Bordeaux. From his uncle he inherited the barony of Montesquieu and the office of Président à Mortier at the Parliament of Guyenne at Bordeaux. Fame, national and international, came suddenly 1721 with the Lettres persanes “The Persian Letters”, published in Holland and France, a landmark of the Enlightenment. His Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, written and printed 1734 to remind the authorities of his qualifications and availability, delivered the wrong message at the wrong time anti-militarism, pacifism, free trade, while France supported Poland’s King Stanislas, dethroned by Russia and Austria. Montesquieu withdrew the Réflexions before publication and substituted the Considerations on the Romans: the same thesis is expounded here, but in the exclusively classical context of ancient history. The stratagem succeeded: the Amsterdam edition was freely imported; the Paris edition appeared with a royal privilège 1734. A few months after the appearance of the Considerations, he undertook L’Esprit des lois, the outline of a modern political science, conceived as the foundation of an effective governmental policy. His optimism was shaken by the disasters of the War of Austrian Succession 174048; the Esprit des lois underwent hurried changes that upset its original plan. During the very printing process, the author was discovering the true essence of his philosophie pratique: it would never culminate in a final, invariable program, but in an orientation, continuously, intelligently adapting to the unpredictable circumstances of historical time in the light of permanent values. According to L’Esprit des lois, governments are either a “republic,” a “monarchie,” or a “despotism.” The principles, or motivational forces, of these types of government are, respectively, “virtus,” “honor,” and fear. The type of government a people has depends on its character, history, and geographical situation. Only a constitutional government that separates its executive, legislative, and judicial powers (cf. Grice, “The power structure of the soul: politics”) preserves liberty, taken as the power to do what one ought to will. A constitutional monarchy with separation of powers is the best form of government. Montesquieu influenced the authors of the New World Constitution and the political philosophers Burke and Rousseau. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Social justice.”

Moore: g. e. –  and his paradox: cited by H. P. Grice. Irish London-born philosopher who spearheaded the attack on idealism and was a major supporter of realism in all its forms: metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological. He was born in Upper Norwood, a suburb of London; did his undergraduate work at Cambridge ; spent 84 as a fellow of Trinity ; returned to Cambridge in 1 as a lecturer; and was granted a professorship there in 5. He also served as editor of Mind. The bulk of his work falls into four categories: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical methodology. Metaphysics. In this area, Moore is mainly known for his attempted refutation of idealism and his defense thereby of realism. In his “The Refutation of Idealism” 3, he argued that there is a crucial premise that is essential to all possible arguments for the idealistic conclusion that “All reality is mental spiritual.” This premise is: “To be is to be perceived” in the broad sense of ‘perceive’. Moore argued that, under every possible interpretation of it, that premise is either a tautology or false; hence no significant conclusion can ever be inferred from it. His positive defense of realism had several prongs. One was to show that there are certain claims held by non-realist philosophers, both idealist ones and skeptical ones. Moore argued, in “A Defense of Common Sense” 5, that these claims are either factually false or self-contradictory, or that in some cases there is no good reason to believe them. Among the claims that Moore attacked are these: “Propositions about purported material facts are false”; “No one has ever known any such propositions to be true”; “Every purported physical fact is logically dependent on some mental fact”; and “Every physical fact is causally dependent on some mental fact.” Another major prong of Moore’s defense of realism was to argue for the existence of an external world and later to give a “Proof of an External World” 3. Epistemology. Most of Moore’s work in this area dealt with the various kinds of knowledge we have, why they must be distinguished, and the problem of perception and our knowledge of an external world. Because he had already argued for the existence of an external world in his metaphysics, he here focused on how we know it. In many papers and chapters e.g., “The Nature and Reality of Objects of Perception,” 6 he examined and at times supported three main positions: naive or direct realism, representative or indirect realism, and phenomenalism. Although he seemed to favor direct realism at first, in the majority of his papers he found representative realism to be the most supportable position despite its problems. It should also be noted that, in connection with his leanings mood toward representative realism, Moore maintained the existence of sense-data and argued at length for an account of just how they are related to physical objects. That there are sense-data Moore never doubted. The question was, What is their ontological status? With regard to the various kinds of knowledge or ways of knowing, Moore made a distinction between dispositional or non-actualized and actualized knowledge. Within the latter Moore made distinctions between direct apprehension often known as knowledge by acquaintance, indirect apprehension, and knowledge proper or propositional knowledge. He devoted much of his work to finding the conditions for knowledge proper. Ethics. In his major work in ethics, Principia Ethica 3, Moore maintained that the central problem of ethics is, What is good?  meaning by this, not what things are good, but how ‘good’ is to be defined. He argued that there can be only one answer, one that may seem disappointing, namely: good is good, or, alternatively, ‘good’ is indefinable. Thus ‘good’ denotes a “unique, simple object of thought” that is indefinable and unanalyzable. His first argument on behalf of that claim consisted in showing that to identify good with some other object i.e., to define ‘good’ is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. To commit this fallacy is to reduce ethical propositions to either psychological propositions or reportive definitions as to how people use words. In other words, what was meant to be an ethical proposition, that X is good, becomes a factual proposition about people’s desires or their usage of words. Moore’s second argument ran like this: Suppose ‘good’ were definable. Then the result would be even worse than that of reducing ethical propositions to non-ethical propositions  ethical propositions would be tautologies! For example, suppose you defined ‘good’ as ‘pleasure’. Then suppose you maintained that pleasure is good. All you would be asserting is that pleasure is pleasure, a tautology. To avoid this conclusion ‘good’ must mean something other than ‘pleasure’. Why is this the naturalistic fallacy? Because good is a non-natural property. But even if it were a natural one, there would still be a fallacy. Hence some have proposed calling it the definist fallacy  the fallacy of attempting to define ‘good’ by any means. This argument is often known as the open question argument because whatever purported definition of ‘good’ anyone offers, it would always be an open question whether whatever satisfies the definition really is good. In the last part of Principia Ethica Moore turned to a discussion of what sorts of things are the greatest goods with which we are acquainted. He argued for the view that they are personal affection and aesthetic enjoyments. Philosophical methodology. Moore’s methodology in philosophy had many components, but two stand out: his appeal to and defense of common sense and his utilization of various methods of philosophical/conceptual analysis. “A Defense of Common Sense” argued for his claim that the commonsense view of the world is wholly true, and for the claim that any view which opposed that view is either factually false or self-contradictory. Throughout his writings Moore distinguished several kinds of analysis and made use of them extensively in dealing with philosophical problems. All of these may be found in the works cited above and other essays gathered into Moore’s Philosophical Studies2 and Philosophical Papers 9. These have been referred to as refutational analysis, with two subforms, showing contradictions and “translation into the concrete”; distinctional analysis; decompositional analysis either definitional or divisional; and reductional analysis. Moore was greatly revered as a teacher. Many of his students and colleagues have paid high tribute to him in very warm and grateful terms.  Moore’s paradox, as first discussed by G. E. Moore, the perplexity involving assertion of what is expressed by conjunctions such as ‘It’s raining, but I believe it isn’t’ and ‘It’s raining, but I don’t believe it is’. The oddity of such presenttense first-person uses of ‘to believe’ seems peculiar to those conjunctions just because it is assumed both that, when asserting  roughly, representing as true  a conjunction, one also asserts its conjuncts, and that, as a rule, the assertor believes the asserted proposition. Thus, no perplexity arises from assertions of, for instance, ‘It’s raining today, but I falsely believed it wasn’t until I came out to the porch’ and ‘If it’s raining but I believe it isn’t, I have been misled by the weather report’. However, there are reasons to think that, if we rely only on these assumptions and examples, our characterization of the problem is unduly narrow. First, assertion seems relevant only because we are interested in what the assertor believes. Secondly, those conjunctions are disturbing only insofar as they show that Moore’s paradox Moore’s paradox 583    583 some of the assertor’s beliefs, though contingent, can only be irrationally held. Thirdly, autobiographical reports that may justifiably be used to charge the reporter with irrationality need be neither about his belief system, nor conjunctive, nor true e.g., ‘I don’t exist’, ‘I have no beliefs’, nor false e.g., ‘It’s raining, but I have no evidence that it is’. So, Moore’s paradox is best seen as the problem posed by contingent propositions that cannot be justifiably believed. Arguably, in forming a belief of those propositions, the believer acquires non-overridable evidence against believing them. A successful analysis of the problem along these lines may have important epistemological consequences.  Refs.: Grice, “Oxford seminars.” Grice dedicated a full chapter to the Moore paradox. Mainly, Moore is confused in lexicological ways. An emisor EXPRESSES the belief that p. What the emisor communicates is that p, not that he believes that p. He does not convey explicitly that he believes that p, nor implicitly. Belief and its expression is linked conceptually with the mode – indicative (‘est’); as is desire and its expression with the imperative mode (“sit”).

dilemma. Grice: “Ryle overuses the word dilemma in his popularization, “Dilemmas”.” 1 Any problem where morality is relevant. This broad use includes not only conflicts among moral reasons but also conflicts between moral reasons and reasons of law, religion, or self-interest. In this sense, Abraham is in a moral dilemma when God commands him to sacrifice his son, even if he has no moral reason to obey. Similarly, I am in a moral dilemma if I cannot help a friend in trouble without forgoing a lucrative but morally neutral business opportunity. ’Moral dilemma’ also often refers to 2 any topic area where it is not known what, if anything, is morally good or right. For example, when one asks whether abortion is immoral in any way, one could call the topic “the moral dilemma of abortion.” This epistemic use does not imply that anything really is immoral at all. Recently, moral philosophers have discussed a much narrower set of situations as “moral dilemmas.” They usually define ‘moral dilemma’ as 3 a situation where an agent morally ought to do each of two acts but cannot do both. The bestknown example is Sartre’s student who morally ought to care for his mother in Paris but at the same time morally ought to go to England to join the Free  and fight the Nazis. However, ‘ought’ covers ideal actions that are not morally required, such as when someone ought to give to a certain charity but is not required to do so. Since most common examples of moral dilemmas include moral obligations or duties, or other requirements, it is more accurate to define ‘moral dilemma’ more narrowly as 4 a situation where an agent has a moral requirement to do each of two acts but cannot do both. Some philosophers also refuse to call a situation a moral dilemma when one of the conflicting requirements is clearly overridden, such as when I must break a trivial promise in order to save a life. To exclude such resolvable conflicts, ‘moral dilemma’ can be defined as 5 a situation where an agent has a moral requirement to adopt each of two alternatives, and neither requirement is overridden, but the agent cannot fulfill both. Another common move is to define ‘moral dilemma’ as 6 a situation where every alternative is morally wrong. This is equivalent to 4 or 5, respectively, if an act is morally wrong whenever it violates any moral requirement or any non-overridden moral requirement. However, we usually do not call an act wrong unless it violates an overriding moral requirement, and then 6 rules out moral dilemmas by definition, since overriding moral requirements clearly cannot conflict. Although 5 thus seems preferable, some would object that 5 includes trivial requirements and conflicts, such as conflicts between trivial promises. To include only tragic situations, we could define ‘moral dilemma’ as 7 a situation where an agent has a strong moral obligation or requirement to adopt each of two alternatives, and neither is overridden, but the agent cannot adopt both alternatives. This definition is strong enough to raise the important controversies about moral dilemmas without being so strong as to rule out their possibility by definition. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Ryle’s dilemmas: are they?”

epistemology, the discipline, at the intersection of ethics and epistemology, that studies the epistemic status and relations of moral judgments and principles. It has developed out of an interest, common to both ethics and epistemology, in questions of justification and justifiability  in epistemology, of statements or beliefs, and in ethics, of actions as well as judgments of actions and also general principles of judgment. Its most prominent questions include the following. Can normative claims be true or false? If so, how can they be known to be true or false? If not, what status do they have, and are they capable of justification? If they are capable of justification, how can they be justified? Does the justification of normative claims differ with respect to particular claims and with respect to general principles? In epistemology recent years have seen a tendency to accept as valid an account of knowledge as entailing justified true belief, a conception that requires an account not just of truth but also of justification and of justified belief. Thus, under what conditions is someone justified, epistemically, in believing something? Justification, of actions, of judgments, and of principles, has long been a central element in ethics. It is only recently that justification in ethics came to be thought of as an epistemological problem, hence ‘moral epistemology’, as an expression, is a fairly recent coinage, although its problems have a long lineage. One long-standing linkage is provided by the challenge of skepticism. Skepticism in ethics can be about the existence of any genuine distinction between right and wrong, or it can focus on the possibility of attaining any knowledge of right and wrong, good or bad. Is there a right answer? is a question in the metaphysics of ethics. Can we know what the right answer is, and if so how? is one of moral epistemology. Problems of perception and observation and ones about observation statements or sense-data play an important role in epistemology. There is not any obvious parallel in moral epistemology, unless it is the role of prereflective moral judgments, or commonsense moral judgments  moral judgments unguided by any overt moral theory  which can be taken to provide the data of moral theory, and which need to be explained, systematized, coordinated, or revised to attain an appropriate relation between theory and data. This would be analogous to taking the data of epistemology to be provided, not by sense-data or observations but by judgments of perception or observation statements. Once this step is taken the parallel is very close. One source of moral skepticism is the apparent lack of any observational counterpart for moral predicates, which generates the question how moral judgments can be true if there is nothing for them to correspond to. Another source of moral skepticism is apparently constant disagreement and uncertainty, which would appear to be explained by the skeptical hypothesis denying the reality of moral distinctions. Noncognitivism in ethics maintains that moral judgments are not objects of knowledge, that they make no statements capable of truth or falsity, but are or are akin to expressions of attitudes. Some other major differences among ethical theories are largely epistemological in character. Intuitionism maintains that basic moral propositions are knowable by intuition. Empiricism in ethics maintains that moral propositions can be established by empirical means or are complex forms of empirical statements. Ethical rationalism maintains that the fundamental principles of morality can be established a priori as holding of necessity. This is exemplified by Kant’s moral philosophy, in which the categorical imperative is regarded as synthetic a priori; more recently by what Alan Gewirth b.2 calls the “principle of generic consistency,” which he claims it is selfcontradictory to deny. Ethical empiricism is exemplified by classical utilitarianism, such as that of Bentham, which aspires to develop ethics as an empirical science. If the consequences of actions can be scientifically predicted and their utilities calculated, then ethics can be a science. Situationism is equivalent to concrete case intuitionism in maintaining that we can know immediately what ought to be done in specific cases, but most ethical theories maintain that what ought to be done is, in J. S. Mill’s words, determined by “the application of a law to an individual case.” Different theories differ on the epistemic status of these laws and on the process of application. Deductivists, either empiricistic or rationalistic, hold that the law is essentially unchanged in the application; non-deductivists hold that the law is modified in the process of application. This distinction is explained in F. L. Will, “Beyond Deduction.” There is similar variation about what if anything is selfevident, Sidgwick maintaining that only certain highly abstract principles are self-evident, Ross that only general rules are, and Prichard that only concrete judgments are, “by an act of moral thinking.” Other problems in moral epistemology are provided by the factvalue distinction  and controversies about whether there is any such distinction  and the isought question, the question how a moral judgment can be derived from statements of fact alone. Naturalists affirm the possibility, non-naturalists deny it. Prescriptivists claim that moral judgments are prescriptions and cannot be deduced from descriptive statements alone. This question ultimately leads to the question how an ultimate principle can be justified. If it cannot be deduced from statements of fact, that route is out; if it must be deduced from some other moral principle, then the principle deduced cannot be ultimate and in any case this process is either circular or leads to an infinite regress. If the ultimate principle is self-evident, then the problem may have an answer. But if it is not it would appear to be arbitrary. The problem of the justification of an ultimate principle continues to be a leading one in moral epistemology. Recently there has been much interest in the status and existence of “moral facts.” Are there any, what are they, and how are they established as “facts”? This relates to questions about moral realism. Moral realism maintains that moral predicates are real and can be known to be so; anti-realists deny this. This denial links with the view that moral properties supervene on natural ones, and the problem of supervenience is another recent link between ethics and epistemology. Pragmatism in ethics maintains that a moral problem is like any problem in that it is the occasion for inquiry and moral judgments are to be regarded as hypotheses to be tested by how well they resolve the problem. This amounts to an attempt to bypass the isought problem and all such “dualisms.” So is constructivism, a development owing much to the work of Rawls, which contrasts with moral realism. Constructivism maintains that moral ideas are human constructs and the task is not epistemological or metaphysical but practical and theoretical  that of attaining reflective equilibrium between considered moral judgments and the principles that coordinate and explain them. On this view there are no moral facts. Opponents maintain that this only replaces a foundationalist view of ethics with a coherence conception. The question whether questions of moral epistemology can in this way be bypassed can be regarded as itself a question of moral epistemology. And the question of the foundations of morality, and whether there are foundations, can still be regarded as a question of moral epistemology, as distinct from a question of the most convenient and efficient arrangement of our moral ideas. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Our knowledge of right and wrong: do we have it? Is it intuitive as Oxonians believe?”

meta-ethics: morality, an informal public system applying to all rational persons, governing behavior that affects others, having the lessening of evil or harm as its goal, and including what are commonly known as the moral rules, moral ideals, and moral virtues. To say that it is a public system means that all those to whom it applies must understand it and that it must not be irrational for them to use it in deciding what to do and in judging others to whom the system applies. Games are the paradigm cases of public systems; all games have a point and the rules of a game apply to all who play it. All players know the point of the game and its rules, and it is not irrational for them to be guided by the point and rules and to judge the behavior of other players by them. To say that morality is informal means that there is no decision procedure or authority that can settle all its controversial questions. Morality thus resembles a backyard game of basketball more than a professional game. Although there is overwhelming agreement on most moral matters, certain controversial questions must be settled in an ad hoc fashion or not settled at all. For example, when, if ever, abortion is acceptable is an unresolvable moral matter, but each society and religion can adopt its own position. That morality has no one in a position of authority is one of the most important respects in which it differs from law and religion. Although morality must include the commonly accepted moral rules such as those prohibiting killing and deceiving, different societies can interpret these rules somewhat differently. They can also differ in their views about the scope of morality, i.e., about whether morality protects newborns, fetuses, or non-human animals. Thus different societies can have somewhat different moralities, although this difference has limits. Also within each society, a person may have his own view about when it is justified to break one of the rules, e.g., about how much harm would have to be prevented in order to justify deceiving someone. Thus one person’s morality may differ somewhat from another’s, but both will agree on the overwhelming number of non-controversial cases. A moral theory is an attempt to describe, explain, and if possible justify, morality. Unfortunately, most moral theories attempt to generate some simplified moral code, rather than to describe the complex moral system that is already in use. Morality does not resolve all disputes. Morality does not require one always to act so as to produce the best consequences or to act only in those ways that one would will everyone to act. Rather morality includes both moral rules that no one should transgress and moral ideals that all are encouraged to follow, but much of what one does will not be governed by morality. H. P. Grice, “Meta-ethics in postwar Oxford philosophy: Hare, Nowell-Smith, myself, and others!”

meta-ethics:, 1 the subfield of psychology that traces the development over time of moral reasoning and opinions in the lives of individuals this subdiscipline includes work of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan; 2 the part of philosophy where philosophy of mind and ethics overlap, which concerns all the psychological issues relevant to morality. There are many different psychological matters relevant to ethics, and each may be relevant in more than one way. Different ethical theories imply different sorts of connections. So moral psychology includes work of many and diverse kinds. But several traditional clusters of concern are evident. Some elements of moral psychology consider the psychological matters relevant to metaethical issues, i.e., to issues about the general nature of moral truth, judgment, and knowledge. Different metaethical theories invoke mental phenomena in different ways: noncognitivism maintains that sentences expressing moral judgments do not function to report truths or falsehoods, but rather, e.g., to express certain emotions or to prescribe certain actions. So some forms of noncognitivism imply that an understanding of certain sorts of emotions, or of special activities like prescribing that may involve particular psychological elements, is crucial to a full understanding of how ethical sentences are meaningful. Certain forms of cognitivism, the view that moral declarative sentences do express truths or falsehoods, imply that moral facts consist of psychological facts, that for instance moral judgments consist of expressions of positive psychological attitudes of some particular kind toward the objects of those judgments. And an understanding of psychological phenomena like sentiment is crucial according to certain sorts of projectivism, which hold that the supposed moral properties of things are mere misleading projections of our sentiments onto the objects of those sentiments. Certain traditional moral sense theories and certain traditional forms of intuitionism have held that special psychological faculties are crucial for our epistemic access to moral truth. Particular views in normative ethics, particular views about the moral status of acts, persons, and other targets of normative evaluation, also often suggest that an understanding of certain psychological matters is crucial to ethics. Actions, intentions, and character are some of the targets of evaluation of normative ethics, and their proper understanding involves many issues in philosophy of mind. Also, many normative theorists have maintained that there is a close connection between pleasure, happiness, or desiresatisfaction and a person’s good, and these things are also a concern of philosophy of mind. In addition, the rightness of actions is often held to be closely connected to the motives, beliefs, and other psychological phenomena that lie behind those actions. Various other traditional philosophical concerns link ethical and psychological issues: the nature of the patterns in the long-term development in individuals of moral opinions and reasoning, the appropriate form for moral education and punishment, the connections between obligation and motivation, i.e., between moral reasons and psychological causes, and the notion of free will and its relation to moral responsibility and autonomy. Some work in philosophy of mind also suggests that moral phenomena, or at least normative phenomena of some kind, play a crucial role in illuminating or constituting psychological phenomena of various kinds, but the traditional concern of moral psychology has been with the articulation of the sort of philosophy of mind that can be useful to ethics.  Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Meta-ethics in post-war Oxford philosophy: Hare, Nowell-Smith, myself, and others!”

“pratical reason” -- moral rationalism, the view that the substance of morality, usually in the form of general moral principles, can be known a priori. The view is defended by Kant in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, but it goes back at least to Plato. Both Plato and Kant thought that a priori moral knowledge could have an impact on what we do quite independently of any desire that we happen to have. This motivational view is also ordinarily associated with moral rationalism. It comes in two quite different forms. The first is that a priori moral knowledge consists in a sui generis mental state that is both belief-like and desire-like. This seems to have been Plato’s view, for he held that the belief that something is good is itself a disposition to promote that thing. The second is that a priori moral knowledge consists in a belief that is capable of rationally producing a distinct desire. Rationalists who make the first claim have had trouble accommodating the possibility of someone’s believing that something is good but, through weakness of will, not mustering the desire to do it. Accordingly, they have been forced to assimilate weakness of will to ignorance of the good. Rationalists who make the second claim about reason’s action-producing capacity face no such problem. For this reason, their view is often preferred. The best-known anti-rationalist about morality is Hume. His Treatise of Human Nature denies both that morality’s substance can be known by reason alone and that reason alone is capable of producing action. 

Griceian realism: a metaethical view committed to the objectivity of ethics. It has 1 metaphysical, 2 semantic, and 3 epistemological components. 1 Its metaphysical component is the claim that there are moral facts and moral properties whose existence and nature are independent of people’s beliefs and attitudes about what is right or wrong. In this claim, moral realism contrasts with an error theory and with other forms of nihilism that deny the existence of moral facts and properties. It contrasts as well with various versions of moral relativism and other forms of ethical constructivism that make moral facts consist in facts about people’s moral beliefs and attitudes. 2 Its semantic component is primarily cognitivist. Cognitivism holds that moral judgments should be construed as assertions about the moral properties of actions, persons, policies, and other objects of moral assessment, that moral predicates purport to refer to properties of such objects, that moral judgments or the propositions that they express can be true or false, and that cognizers can have the cognitive attitude of belief toward the propositions that moral judgments express. These cognitivist claims contrast with the noncognitive claims of emotivism and prescriptivism, according to which the primary purpose of moral judgments is to express the appraiser’s attitudes or commitments, rather than to state facts or ascribe properties. Moral realism also holds that truth for moral judgments is non-epistemic; in this way it contrasts with moral relativism and other forms of ethical constructivism that make the truth of a moral judgment epistemic. The metaphysical and semantic theses imply that there are some true moral propositions. An error theory accepts the cognitivist semantic claims but denies the realist metaphysical thesis. It holds that moral judgments should be construed as containing referring expressions and having truth-values, but insists that these referring expressions are empty, because there are no moral facts, and that no moral claims are true. Also on this theory, commonsense moral thought presupposes the existence of moral facts and properties, but is systematically in error. In this way, the error theory stands to moral realism much as atheism stands to theism in a world of theists. J. L. Mackie introduced and defended the error theory in his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 7. 3 Finally, if moral realism is to avoid skepticism it must claim that some moral beliefs are true, that there are methods for justifying moral beliefs, and that moral knowledge is possible. While making these metaphysical, semantic, and epistemological claims, moral realism is compatible with a wide variety of other metaphysical, semantic, and epistemological principles and so can take many different forms. The moral realists in the early part of the twentieth century were generally intuitionists. Intuitionism combined a commitment to moral realism with a foundationalist moral epistemology according to which moral knowledge must rest on self-evident moral truths and with the nonnaturalist claim that moral facts and properties are sui generis and not reducible to any natural facts or properties. Friends of noncognitivism found the metaphysical and epistemological commitments of intuitionism extravagant and so rejected moral realism. Later moral realists have generally sought to defend moral realism without the metaphysical and epistemological trappings of intuitionism. One such version of moral realism takes a naturalistic form. This form of ethical naturalism claims that our moral beliefs are justified when they form part of an explanatorily coherent system of beliefs with one another and with various non-moral beliefs, and insists that moral properties are just natural properties of the people, actions, and policies that instantiate them. Debate between realists and anti-realists and within the realist camp centers on such issues as the relation between moral judgment and action, the rational authority of morality, moral epistemology and methodology, the relation between moral and non-moral natural properties, the place of ethics in a naturalistic worldview, and the parity of ethics and the sciences. 

“Some remarks about the senses” – Grice: “Grice: “And then there’s Shaftesbury who thinks he is being witty when he speaks of a ‘moral’ “sense”!” -- moral sense theory, an ethical theory, developed by some British philosophers  notably Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume  according to which the pleasure or pain a person feels upon thinking about or “observing” certain character traits is indicative of the virtue or vice, respectively, of those features. It is a theory of “moral perception,” offered in response to moral rationalism, the view that moral distinctions are derived by reason alone, and combines Locke’s empiricist doctrine that all ideas begin in experience with the belief, widely shared at the time, that feelings play a central role in moral evaluation and motivation. On this theory, our emotional responses to persons’ characters are often “perceptions” of their morality, just as our experiences of an apple’s redness and sweetness are perceptions of its color and taste. These ideas of morality are seen as products of an “internal” sense, because they are produced in the “observer” only after she forms a concept of the conduct or trait being observed or contemplated  as when a person realizes that she is seeing someone intentionally harm another and reacts with displeasure at what she sees. The moral sense is conceived as being analogous to, or possibly an aspect of, our capacity to recognize varying degrees of beauty in things, which modern writers call “the sense of beauty.” Rejecting the popular view that morality is based on the will of God, Shaftesbury maintains rather that morality depends on human nature, and he introduces the notion of a sense of right and wrong, possessed uniquely by human beings, who alone are capable of reflection. Hutcheson argues that to approve of a character is to regard it as virtuous. For him, reason, which discovers relations of inanimate objects to rational agents, is unable to arouse our approval in the absence of a moral sense. Ultimately, we can explain why, for example, we approve of someone’s temperate character only by appealing to our natural tendency to feel pleasure sometimes identified with approval at the thought of characters that exhibit benevolence, the trait to which all other virtues can be traced. This disposition to feel approval and disapproval is what Hutcheson identifies as the moral sense. Hume emphasizes that typical human beings make moral distinctions on the basis of their feelings only when those sentiments are experienced from a disinterested or “general” point of view. In other words, we turn our initial sentiments into moral judgments by compensating for the fact that we feel more strongly about those to whom we are emotionally close than those from whom we are more distant. On a widely held interpretation of Hume, the moral sense provides not only judgments, but also motives to act according to those judgments, since its feelings may be motivating passions or arouse such passions. Roderick Firth’s 787 twentieth-century ideal observer theory, according to which moral good is designated by the projected reactions of a hypothetically omniscient, disinterested observer possessing other ideal traits, as well as Brandt’s contemporary moral spectator theory, are direct descendants of the moral sense theory.  Refs: H. P. Grice: “Shaftesbury’s moral sense: some remarks about the ‘senses’ of this ‘expression’!”

moral scepticism, any metaethical view that raises fundamental doubts about morality as a whole. Different kinds of doubts lead to different kinds of moral skepticism. The primary kinds of moral skepticism are epistemological. Moral justification skepticism is the claim that nobody ever has any or adequate justification for believing any substantive moral claim. Moral knowledge skepticism is the claim that nobody ever knows that any substantive moral claim is true. If knowledge implies justification, as is often assumed, then moral justification skepticism implies moral knowledge skepticism. But even if knowledge requires justification, it requires more, so moral knowledge skepticism does not imply moral justification skepticism. Another kind of skeptical view in metaethics rests on linguistic analysis. Some emotivists, expressivists, and prescriptivists argue that moral claims like “Cheating is morally wrong” resemble expressions of emotion or desire like “Boo, cheating” or prescriptions for action like “Don’t cheat”, which are neither true nor false, so moral claims themselves are neither true nor false. This linguistic moral skepticism, which is sometimes called noncognitivism, implies moral knowledge skepticism if knowledge implies truth. Even if such linguistic analyses are rejected, one can still hold that no moral properties or facts really exist. This ontological moral skepticism can be combined with the linguistic view that moral claims assert moral properties and facts to yield an error theory that all positive moral claims are false. A different kind of doubt about morality is often raised by asking, “Why should I be moral?” Practical moral skepticism answers that there is not always any reason or any adequate reason to be moral or to do what is morally required. This view concerns reasons to act rather than reasons to believe. Moral skepticism of all these kinds is often seen as immoral, but moral skeptics can act and be motivated and even hold moral beliefs in much the same way as non-skeptics. Moral skeptics just deny that their or anyone else’s moral beliefs are justified or known or true, or that they have adequate reason to be moral. 

moral status, the suitability of a being to be viewed as an appropriate object of direct moral concern; the nature or degree of a being’s ability to count as a ground of claims against moral agents; the moral standing, rank, or importance of a kind of being; the condition of being a moral patient; moral considerability. Ordinary moral reflection involves considering others. But which others ought to be considered? And how are the various objects of moral consideration to be weighed against one another? Anything might be the topic of moral discussion, but not everything is thought to be an appropriate object of direct moral concern. If there are any ethical constraints on how we may treat a ceramic plate, these seem to derive from considerations about other beings, not from the interests or good or nature of the plate. The same applies, presumably, to a clod of earth. Many philosophers view a living but insentient being, such as a dandelion, in the same way; others have doubts. According to some, even sentient animal life is little more deserving of moral consideration than the clod or the dandelion. This tradition, which restricts significant moral status to humans, has come under vigorous and varied attack by defenders of animal liberation. This attack criticizes speciesism, and argues that “humanism” is analogous to theories that illegitimately base moral status on race, gender, or social class. Some philosophers have referred to beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern as “moral patients.” Moral agents are those beings whose actions are subject to moral evaluation; analogously, moral patients would be those beings whose suffering in the sense of being the objects of the actions of moral agents permits or demands moral evaluation. Others apply the label ‘moral patients’ more narrowly, just to those beings that are appropriate objects of direct moral concern but are not also moral agents. The issue of moral status concerns not only whether beings count at all morally, but also to what degree they count. After all, beings who are moral patients might still have their claims outweighed by the preferred claims of other beings who possess some special moral status. We might, with Nozick, propose “utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people.” Similarly, the bodily autonomy argument in defense of abortion, made famous by Thomson, does not deny that the fetus is a moral patient, but insists that her/his/its claims are limited by the pregnant woman’s prior claim to control her bodily destiny. It has often been thought that moral status should be tied to the condition of “personhood.” The idea has been either that only persons are moral patients, or that persons possess a special moral status that makes them morally more important than nonpersons. Personhood, on such theories, is a minimal condition for moral patiency. Why? Moral patiency is said to be “correlative” with moral agency: a creature has both or neither. Alternatively, persons have been viewed not as the only moral patients, but as a specially privileged elite among moral patients, possessing rights as well as interests. 

More, Henry 161487, English philosopher, theologian, and poet, the most prolific of the Cambridge Platonists. In 1631 he entered Christ’s , where he spent the rest of his life after becoming Fellow in 1641. He was primarily an apologist of anti-Calvinist, latitudinarian stamp whose inalienable philosophico- theological purpose was to demonstrate the existence and immortality of the soul and to cure “two enormous distempers of the mind,” atheism and “enthusiasm.” He described himself as “a Fisher for Philosophers, desirous to draw them to or retain them in the Christian Faith.” His eclectic method deployed Neoplatonism notably Plotinus and Ficino, mystical theologies, cabalistic doctrines as More misconceived them, empirical findings including reports of witchcraft and ghosts, the new science, and the new philosophy, notably the philosophy of Descartes. Yet he rejected Descartes’s beast-machine doctrine, his version of dualism, and the pretensions of Cartesian mechanical philosophy to explain all physical phenomena. Animals have souls; the universe is alive with souls. Body and spirit are spatially extended, the former being essentially impenetrable, inert, and discerpible divisible into parts, the latter essentially penetrable, indiscerpible, active, and capable of a spiritual density, which More called essential spissitude, “the redoubling or contracting of substance into less space than it does sometimes occupy.” Physical processes are activated and ordered by the spirit of nature, a hylarchic principle and “the vicarious power of God upon this great automaton, the world.” More’s writings on natural philosophy, especially his doctrine of infinite space, are thought to have influenced Newton. More attacked Hobbes’s materialism and, in the 1660s and 1670s, the impieties of Dutch Cartesianism, including the perceived atheism of Spinoza and his circle. He regretted the “enthusiasm” for and conversion to Quakerism of Anne Conway, his “extramural” tutee and assiduous correspondent. More had a partiality for coinages and linguistic exotica. We owe to him ‘Cartesianism’ 1662, coined a few years before the first appearance of the  equivalent, and the substantive ‘materialist’ 1668.

More, Sir Thomas: English humanist, statesman, martyr, and saint. A lawyer by profession, he entered royal service in 1517 and became lord chancellor in 1529. After refusing to swear to the Act of Supremacy, which named Henry VIII the head of the English church, More was beheaded as a traitor. Although his writings include biography, poetry, letters, and anti-heretical tracts, his only philosophical work, Utopia published in Latin, 1516, is his masterpiece. Covering a wide variety of subjects including government, education, punishment, religion, family life, and euthanasia, Utopia contrasts European social institutions with their counterparts on the imaginary island of Utopia. Inspired in part by Plato’s Republic, the Utopian communal system is designed to teach virtue and reward it with happiness. The absence of money, private property, and most social distinctions allows Utopians the leisure to develop the faculties in which happiness consists. Because of More’s love of irony, Utopia has been subject to quite different interpretations. 

mosca: Essential Italian philosopher, who made pioneering contributions to the theory of democratic elitism. Combining the life of a  professor with that of a politician, he taught such subjects as constitutional law, public law, political science, and history of political theory; at various times he was also an editor of the Parliamentary proceedings, an elected member of the Chamber of Deputies, an under-secretary for colonial affairs, a newspaper columnist, and a member of the Senate. For Mosca ‘elitism’ refers to the empirical generalization that a society is ruled by an organised minority. His democratic commitment is embodied in what he calls juridical defense: the normative principle that political developments are to be judged by whether and how they prevent any one person, class, force, or institution from dominating the others. Mosca’s third main contribution is a framework consisting of two intersecting distinctions that yield four possible ideal types, defined as follows: in autocracy, authority flows from the rulers to the ruled. In liberalism, from the ruled to the rulers. In democracy, the ruling class is open to renewal by members of other classes; in aristocracy it is not. He was influenced by, and in turn influenced, positivism, for the elitist thesis presumably constitutes the fundamental “law” of political “science.” Even deeper is his connection with the tradition of Machiavelli’s political realism. There is also no question that he practiced an empirical approach. In the tradition of elitism, he may be compared and contrasted with Pareto, Michels, and Schumpeter; and in the tradition of  political philosophy, to Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Mosca’s liberalism;” Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Mosca," per il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.

Motivatum -- motivation, a property central in motivational explanations of intentional conduct. To assert that Grice is driving to Lord’s today because she wants to see his cricket team play and believes that they are playing today at Lord’s is to offer an explanation of Grice’s action. On a popular interpretation, the assertion mentions a pair of attitudes: a desire and a belief. Grice’s s desire is a paradigmatic motivational attitude in that it inclines him to bring about the satisfaction of that very attitude. The primary function of motivational attitudes is to bring about their own satisfaction by inducing the agent to undertake a suitable course of action, and, arguably, any attitude that has that function is, ipso facto, a motivational one. The related thesis that only attitudes having this function are motivational  or, more precisely, motivation-constituting  is implausible. Grice hopes that the Oxfordshire Cricket Team won yesterday. Plainly, his hope cannot bring about its own satisfaction, since Grice has no control over the past. Even so, the hope seemingly may motivate action e.g., Grice’s searching for sports news on her car radio, in which case the hope is motivation-constituting. Some philosophers have claimed that our beliefs that we are morally required to take a particular course of action are motivation-constituting, and such beliefs obviously do not have the function of bringing about their own satisfaction i.e., their truth. However, the claim is controversial, as is the related claim that beliefs of this kind are “besires”  that is, not merely beliefs but desires as well. Refs.: “Desire, belief, and besire.”   

Grice: the explanatory-justificatory distinction – “To explain” is not to explicate, but to render ‘plain’ – To justify is hardly to render ‘plain’! Grice is aware of this, because he does not use the ‘explicatory-justificatory’ distinction. Therefore, the ‘justificatory’ is conceptually prior – a philosopher looks for justification – hardly to render stuff plain – “Quite the opposite: my claim to fame is to follow the alleged professional duty of a philosophy professor: to render obscure what is clear, and vice versa!” -- motivational explanation -- a type of explanation of goal-directed behavior where the explanans appeals to the motives of the agent. The explanation usually is in the following form: Smith swam hard in order to win the race. Here the description of what Smith did identifies the behavior to be explained, and the phrase that follows ‘in order to’ identifies the goal or the state of affairs the obtaining of which was the moving force behind the behavior. The general presumption is that the agent whose behavior is being explained is capable of deliberating and acting on the decisions reached as a result of the deliberation. Thus, it is dubious whether the explanation contained in ‘The plant turned toward the sun in order to receive more light’ is a motivational explanation. Two problems are thought to surround motivational explanations. First, since the state of affairs set as the goal is, at the time of the action, non-existent, it can only act as the “moving force” by appearing as the intentional object of an inner psychological state of the agent. Thus, motives are generally desires for specific objects or states of affairs on which the agent acts. So motivational explanation is basically the type of explanation provided in folk psychology, and as such it inherits all the alleged problems of the latter. And second, what counts as a motive for an action under one description usually fails to be a motive for the same action under a different description. My motive for saying “hello” may have been my desire to answer the phone, but my motive for saying “hello” loudly was to express my irritation at the person calling me so late at night. 

motivational internalism, the view that moral motivation is internal to moral duty or the sense of duty. The view represents the contemporary understanding of Hume’s thesis that morality is essentially practical. Hume went on to point out the apparent logical gap between statements of fact, which express theoretical judgments, and statements about what ought to be done, which express practical judgments. Motivational internalism offers one explanation for this gap. No motivation is internal to the recognition of facts. The specific internal relation the view affirms is that of necessity. Thus, motivational internalists hold that if one sees that one has a duty to do a certain action or that it would be right to do it, then necessarily one has a motive to do it. For example, if one sees that it is one’s duty to donate blood, then necessarily one has a motive to donate blood. Motivational externalism, the opposing view, denies this relation. Its adherents hold that it is possible for one to see that one has a duty to do a certain action or that it would be right to do it yet have no motive to do it. Motivational externalists typically, though not universally, deny any real gap between theoretical and practical judgments. Motivational internalism takes either of two forms, rationalist and anti-rationalist. Rationalists, such as Plato and Kant, hold that the content or truth of a moral requirement guarantees in those who understand it a motive of compliance. Anti-rationalists, such as Hume, hold that moral judgment necessarily has some affective or volitional component that supplies a motive for the relevant action but that renders morality less a matter of reason and truth than of feeling or commitment. It is also possible in the abstract to draw an analogous distinction between two forms of motivational externalism, cognitivist and noncognitivist, but because the view springs from an interest in assimilating practical judgment to theoretical judgment, its only influential form has been cognitivist. 

mystical experience, an experience alleged to reveal some aspect of reality not normally accessible to sensory experience or cognition. The experience  typically characterized by its profound emotional impact on the one who experiences it, its transcendence of spatial and temporal distinctions, its transitoriness, and its ineffability  is often but not always associated with some religious tradition. In theistic religions, mystical experiences are claimed to be brought about by God or by some other superhuman agent. Theistic mystical experiences evoke feelings of worshipful awe. Their content can vary from something no more articulate than a feeling of closeness to God to something as specific as an item of revealed theology, such as, for a Christian mystic, a vision of the Trinity. Non-theistic mystical experiences are usually claimed to reveal the metaphysical unity of all things and to provide those who experience them with a sense of inner peace or bliss.

mysticism, a doctrine or discipline maintaining that one can gain knowledge of reality that is not accessible to sense perception or to rational, conceptual thought. Generally associated with a religious tradition, mysticism can take a theistic form, as it has in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, or a non-theistic form, as it has in Buddhism and some varieties of Hinduism. Mystics claim that the mystical experience, the vehicle of mystic  knowledge, is usually the result of spiritual training, involving some combination of prayer, meditation, fasting, bodily discipline, and renunciation of worldly concerns. Theistic varieties of mysticism describe the mystical experience as granted by God and thus not subject to the control of the mystic. Although theists claim to feel closeness to God during the mystical experience, they regard assertions of identity of the self with God as heretical. Non-theistic varieties are more apt to describe the experience as one that can be induced and controlled by the mystic and in which distinctions between the self and reality, or subject and object, are revealed to be illusory. Mystics claim that, although veridical, their experiences cannot be adequately described in language, because ordinary communication is based on sense experience and conceptual differentiation: mystical writings are thus characterized by metaphor and simile. It is con   593 troversial whether all mystical experiences are basically the same, and whether the apparent diversity among them is the result of interpretations influenced by different cultural traditions. 

myth: Grice was aware of Grice, the Welsh philosopher. For Grice had turned a ‘myth,’ the myth of the compact, into a thing that would justify moral obligation – When Grice, the Englishman, gives a mythical account of communication, alla Plato and Paget, he faces the same problem – which he hopes is “very minor,” compared to others. In this case, it’s not about ‘moral obligation’ but about “something else.” Grice was possibly motivated by Quine’s irreverent, “The mth of meaning,” a talk at France, “Le mythe de la signification.” It’s odd that he gives the example of a ‘social contract’, developed by G. R. Grice as a ‘myth’ as his own on ‘expressing pain.’ “My succession of stages is a methodological myth designed to exhibit the conceptual link between expression and communication. Rather than Plato, he appeals to Rawls and the myth of the social conpact! Grice knows a little about Descartess “Discours de la methode,” and he is also aware of similar obsession by Collingwood with philosopical methodology. Grice would joke on midwifery, as the philosopher’s apter method at Oxford: to strangle error at its birth. Grice typifies a generation at Oxford. While he did not socialize with the crème de la crème in pre-war Oxford, he shared some their approach. E.g. a love affair with Russell’s logical construction. After the war, and in retrospect, Grice liked to associate himself with Austin. He obviously felt the need to belong to a group, to make a difference, to make history. Many participants of the play group saw themselves as doing philosophy, rather than reading about it! It was long after that Grice started to note the differences in methodology between Austin and himself. His methodology changed a little. He was enamoured with formalism for a while, and he grants that this love never ceased. In a still later phase, he came to realise that his way of doing philosophy was part of literature (essay writing). And so he started to be slightly more careful about his style – which some found florid. The stylistic concerns were serious. Oxonian philosophers like Holloway had been kept away from philosophy because of the stereotype that the Oxonian philosophers style is pedantic, when it neednt! A philosopher should be allowed, as Plato was, to use a myth, if he thinks his tutee will thank him for that! Grice loved to compare his Oxonian dialectic with Platos Athenian (strictly, Academic) dialectic. Indeed, there is some resemblance of the use of myth in Plato and Grice for philosophical methodological purposes. Grice especially enjoys a myth in his programme in philosophical psychology. In this, he is very much being a philosopher. Non-philosophers usually criticise this methodological use of a myth, but they would, wouldnt they. Grice suggests that a myth has diagogic relevance. Creature construction, the philosopher as demi-god, if mythical, is an easier way for a philosophy don to instil his ideas on his tutee than, say, privileged access and incorrigibility. myth of Er, a tale at the end of Plato’s Republic dramatizing the rewards of justice and philosophy by depicting the process of reincarnation. Complementing the main argument of the work, that it is intrinsically better to be just than unjust, this longest of Plato’s myths blends traditional lore with speculative cosmology to show that justice also pays, usually in life and certainly in the afterlife. Er, a warrior who revived shortly after death, reports how judges assign the souls of the just to heaven but others to punishment in the underworld, and how most return after a thousand years to behold the celestial order, to choose their next lives, and to be born anew.  Refs.: The main source is Grice’s essay on ‘myth’, in The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.

Nagel: not to be confused with Grice’s tutee, Nagel --: a preeminent  philosopher of science, born in the Old World, but with a B.S. degree from the  of the City of New York and his Ph.D. from Columbia, where he taught philosophy at the Philosophy Department. Nagel coauthored the influential An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method with M. R. Cohen. His publications include “Principles of the Theory of Probability” and “Structure of Science.” Nagel was sensitive to developments in logic, foundations of mathematics, and probability theory, and he shared with Russell and with members of the Vienna Circle like Carnap and Frank a respect for the relevance of scientific inquiry for philosophical reflection. But his writing also reveals the influences of Cohen and that strand in the thinking of the pragmatism of Peirce and Dewey which Nagel himself calls “contextualist naturalism.” He was a persuasive critic of Russell’s views of the data of sensation as a source of non-inferential premises for knowledge and of cognate views expressed by some members of the Vienna Circle. Unlike Frege, Russell, Carnap, Popper, and others, Nagel rejects the view that taking account of context in characterizing method threatened to taint philosophical reflection with an unacceptable psychologism. This stance subsequently allowed him to oppose historicist and sociologist approaches to the philosophy of science. Nagel’s contextualism is reflected in his contention that ideas of determinism, probability, explanation, and reduction “can be significantly discussed only if they are directed to the theories or formulations of a science and not its subject matter” Principles of the Theory of Probability. This attitude infused his influential discussions of covering law explanation, statistical explanation, functional explanation, and reduction of one theory to another, in both natural and social science. Similarly, his contention that participants in the debate between realism and instrumentalism should clarify the import of their differences for context-sensitive scientific methodology served as the core of his argument casting doubt on the significance of the dispute. In addition to his extensive writings on scientific knowledge methodology, Nagel wrote influential essays on measurement, the history of mathematics, and the philosophy of law. 

Nagel, Thomas, professor of philosophy and of law at New York , known for his important contributions in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Nagel’s work in these areas is unified by a particular vision of perennial philosophical problems, according to which they emerge from a clash between two perspectives from which human beings can view themselves and the world. From an impersonal perspective, which results from detaching ourselves from our particular viewpoints, we strive to achieve an objective view of the world, whereas from a personal perspective, we see the world from our particular point of view. According to Nagel, dominance of the impersonal perspective in trying to understand reality leads to implausible philosophical views because it fails to accommodate facts about the self, minds, agency, and values that are revealed through engaged personal perspectives. In the philosophy of mind, for instance, Nagel criticizes various reductive accounts of mentality 595 N    595 resulting from taking an exclusively impersonal standpoint because they inevitably fail to account for the irreducibly subjective character of consciousness. In ethics, consequentialist moral theories like utilitarianism, which feature strong impartialist demands that stem from taking a detached, impersonal perspective, find resistance from the personal perspective within which individual goals and motives are accorded an importance not found in strongly impartialist moral theories. An examination of such problems in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics is found in his “Moral Questions” 9 and The View from Nowhere 6. In Equality and Partiality 0 Nagel argues that the impersonal standpoint gives rise to an egalitarian form of impartial regard for all people that often clashes with the goals, concerns, and affections that individuals experience from a personal perspective. Quite generally, then, as Nagel sees it, one important philosophical task is to explore ways in which these two standpoints on both theoretical and practical matters might be integrated. Nagel has also made important contributions regarding the nature and possibility of reason or rationality in both its theoretical and its practical uses. The Possibility of Altruism 0 is an exploration of the structure of practical reason in which Nagel defends the rationality of prudence and altruism, arguing that the possibility of such behavior is connected with our capacities to view ourselves respectively persisting through time and recognizing the reality of other persons. The Last Word 8 is a defense of reason against skeptical views, according to which reason is a merely contingent, locally conditioned feature of particular cultures and hence relative.  Refs: Nagel, “Grice,” from  “A memoir,” H. P. Grice, “Nagel.” Grice: “I bought ‘moral questions’ and found them to be mortal!” --.

natura: Grice -- Grice: beyond the natural/non-natural distinction     ABSTRACT. When we approach, with Grice, the philosophical question involved in what we may call the ‘natural’/ ‘non-natural’ distinction, various conceptual possibilities are open to us. In this contribution, after providing a a historical survey of the distinction with special focus on  its treatment by Grice, I offer a thesis which, echoing Bennett, I label ‘meaning-naturalism.’        Keywords: H. Paul Grice, meaning, naturalism, non-natural meaning  Introduction  Grice sees his approach to ‘meaning’ (or “meaning that …”, as he would rather put it) as ‘rhapsody on a theme by Peirce.’  When he presents his “Meaning” to the Oxford Philosophical Society (only to be published almost a decade later by The Philosophical Review), Grice endows the philosophical community with a full-blown ‘natural’/‘non-natural’ distinction, for which he has naturally become somewhat infamously famous, as when a philosopher, exploring the different causes of death of this or that other philosopher cites Grice as having passed of ‘non-natural causes.’  What is Grice’s ‘natural’/‘non-natural’ distinction about?  As a member of the so-called ‘Oxford school of “ordinary-language” philosophy’ (he disliked the sobriquet), Grice seems initially to have been concerned with what at a later stage he calls a ‘pre-theoretical’ exploration of this or that use of the lexeme ‘mean,’ notably by Peirce.  Grice finds Peirce’s attempt to ‘replace’ the vernacular Anglo-Saxon ‘mean’ with ‘krypto-technical’ jargon as not too sympathetic to these or those Oxonian ears. So, it is this lexeme, or ‘expression,’ ‘mean,’ to which Grice’s distinction applies.  Carefully, as Bennett would point out, using lower-case ‘x’ and ‘y’ for tokens, Grice attempts to  formulate the distinction into two separate super-expressions, where the sub-expression “means that …” occurs:  i.  x meansN that p.  ii.  x meansNN that q.  What is ‘x’? Grice spends some time on this double-edged elucidation (and indeed, the ‘that’-clause explication is a later vintage). He grants that his main focus of concern is with (ii). In passing, he makes some rather intriguing running commentary.  It’s clear why Grice feels the need to spend some time in explicating what he is about to do. Grice’s distinction, as he formulates it, is supposed to ‘refine’ this or that distinction, made by this or that philosopher. While ‘ordinary-language’ philosophers are taken as approaching ‘ordinary-language,’ their underlying motivation is to criticise this or that philosopher’s mischaracterisation of the linguistic nuance at hand.  Grice’s avowed aim in his talk to the Oxford Philosophical Society is to shed light on, to use his characteristically cavalier wording, ‘what people have been thinking,’ which in that context, means ‘what other philosophers have been thinking’ – including Ayer -- or even getting at, ‘when they speak of such things as “natural” versus “conventional” signs.’  Grice thinks that, by his sticking with ‘meaning that …’ (rather than ‘sign’) and ‘non-natural’ (rather ‘conventional’) he is setting a better scene. Why would this be a conceptual improvement? Grice gives two reasons.  First, and again, Grice presents himself as a representative of the Oxonian school of ‘ordinary-language’ philosophy, and exercising what these philosophers referred to this or that adventure in ‘linguistic botany.’ Grice thus sets to explore, introspectively, relying on his intuitions behind his own usage, philosophical and other: a ‘word,’ for example, Grice notes, he would not naturally describe as a ‘sign.’ In Grice’s (but surely not Peirce’s) idio-lect, the expression ‘sign’ is restricted to things like a traffic signal, say.  Second, and again in this adventure in ‘linguistic-botany,’ x (or strictly ‘a,’ for ‘agent,’ now) that can ‘mean’ that p, in a way that is specifically NON-factive (as he’ll later put it, echoing the Kiparskys) but which need not be ‘conventional.’ Grice gives the example of ‘a gesture,’ which a few philosophers would associate with Sraffa’s!  The historical background  Grice’s cavalier reference to ‘what people are getting at’ sounds charmingly Oxonian. He surely has no intention to underestimate the knowledge of the fellow members of The Oxford Philosophical Society. He won’t be seen as ‘going to lecture’ them. This is not a seminar, but a public occasion. He is allowed to be a cavalier.  Had this been a seminar, and being indeed a Lit. Hum. Oxon., Grice knows he can trace the distinction he is making, as he refines alternative ones, to Plato’s Cratylus, where we have Socrates and his dialogical companion playing with various adverbial modifiers, notably, ‘phusei’ and ‘thesei.’  Plato’s ‘phusei,’ surely translates to Grice’s ‘nature’ in ‘natural.’ Plato is carefully in avoiding the subsantive nominative ‘phusis.’ His ‘phusei’ is meant to modify the way something may such may be said to ‘mean’ (‘semein’). Possibly the earliest incarnation of what later will be dubbed as the ‘pooh’ pooh theory of language.  Plato’s ‘thesei’ is slightly more complicated. It is best to stay lexically conservative here and understand it to mean, ‘by position,’ i.e. or, in Grice’s freer prose, by convention. While Plato has to his disposal various other lexemes to do duty for this, he chooses a rather weak one, and again, not in the nominative “thesis,” but as applied to something that ‘means’ that p or q. In any case, Plato’s interest, as indeed Grice’s, is ‘dialectic.’ That x (or a) means that q thesei, by position, entails (as Plato would say if he could borrow from Moore) that it is not the case that x (or a) means that q phusei, by nature. The distinction is supposed to be absolute.  The ‘phusis’/‘thesis’ distinction undergoes a fascinating development in the philosophical tradition, from Greek (or Grecian) into Latin (Roman), and eventually makes it to scholastic philosophy: ‘per natura’/ ‘per positionem,’ or ‘ad placitum.’  Closer to Grice, authors partly philosophising in Grice’s vernacular, such as Hobbes, who is indeed fighting against Latin for the the use of the vernacular in philosophical discourse, will speak of what Grice knew would be familiar terminology to his Oxford audience: ‘natural sign’ versus, rather than Grice’s intentionally rather ugly-sounding ‘non-natural,’ ‘artificial’ or ‘conventional’ sign.  Grice does not use ‘scare quotes,’ but perhaps Umberto Eco would have wished he did! (Indeed, it is best to see Grice as treating ‘a means that p’ as the only ‘literal’ use of ‘mean,’ with ‘natural’ and ‘expression-relative’ uses as ‘derivative, or transferred, or figurative. While he does NOT use ‘scare quotes’ for his examples of ‘meanN,’ as in iii.  iii. Smoke means that there is fire.  Grice cares to quote in the talk from just one rather recent philosopher who was being discussed at Oxford in connection with A. J. Ayer’s approach to ‘moral’ language as being merely ‘emotive.’  Grice makes an explicit reference to Stevenson. While Grice finds Stevenson’s account of the ‘non-natural’ use of “mean” ‘circular’ (in that it relies on conditioning related to ‘communication,’ Stevenson explores various ‘natural’ uses of ‘mean’, and, to emphasise the figurative status, explicitly employs ‘scare quotes.’ For Stevenson, (iii) becomes (iv).  iv. Smoke ‘means’ that there is fire.     For surely ‘smoke’ cannot have an intention – and ‘mean’ is too close to ‘intend’ in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular to allow smoke to mean that p or q – ‘mean’ at most. This is crucial (and suggests just one way of the figuration of ‘mean,’ that will go two ways with Grice when he sees this figuration as applying to ‘expression-relative’ uses of ‘mean,’ as in  v.  ‘There’s smoke’ ‘means’ that there’s smoke.  (Ubi fumus ibi ignis). By carefully deploying scare-quotes, Stevenson is fighting against ‘animism.’ The root of ‘mean’ is cognate with Latin ‘mentare’ and ‘mentire,’ and can notably be traced back to ‘mens,’ the mind. Surely smoke cannot really (if we must use one of those adverbs that Austin called ‘trouser words’) that there is fire – just ‘mean’ it. A careful ‘utterer’ is using the same lexeme in an obviously ‘figurative’ way, and marking this fact explicitly by appealing to an ‘echoic,’ or as Grice may prefer, ‘trans-categorial,’ use.  The ‘fun’ side to this (and for Grice, ‘philosophy need be fun’) is that Grice’s distinction then becomes now the ‘non-natural’/‘natural’ distinction. Scare quotes signal that the realm of ‘mean’ is the realm of the ‘mind,’ and not what Plato might have seen as the realm of nature simpliciter.   But back to Hobbes. Indeed, Hobbes may be drawing on the earlier explorations on this in Latin, by, of all people, Ockham, who speaks now of scenarios where ‘significare’ is modified by the adverb ‘naturaliter,’ and scenarios where it is not.  For this or that example of what Grice has as the ‘natural’ use of ‘mean’, Ockham will stick with ‘significare,’ qualified by ‘naturaliter.’  vi. By smiling, Smith means that he is happy.  Or as Ockham more generically puts it,  vii. Risus ‘significat’ naturaliter interiorem laetitiam.  But Ockham can go pretty Griceian too, as when he wonders about a ‘circulus’ – of a wine barrel ‘artificially’ (or not ‘naturaliter’) placed, or positioned, outside a building, yielding:  viii. Circulus ‘significat’ naturaliter vinum.  The circle, even if artificially (or at least not naturally) placed, is a ‘sign’ or means that wine which is being sold inside the building (Ockham is playing with the composite nature of ‘significare,’ literally to ‘make sign’). In the Peirceian theme on which Grice offers his rhapsody, and which he’ll later adopt in his “Retrospective epilogue,” there is an iconicity involved in the ‘circulus’ scenario, where this ‘iconicity’ requires some conceptual elucidation.   Ockham’s use of the Latin ‘significare’ poses a further question. Strictly, of course, is to ‘make’ (‘ficare’) a sign. Therefore, Grice feels its Latinate counterpart, ‘signifies that…’ as too strong a way to qualify a thing like an expression (or ‘word,’) which for him may not be a sign at all.  Grice’s cavalier attitude and provocative intent is further evidenced by the fact that, years later, when delivering the William James lectures at Harvard, and refining his “Meaning,” he does mention that his programme is concerned with the elucidation of the ‘total signification’ of a remark as uttered by this or that utterer, into this or that variety of this or that explicit and implicit component.  When Grice refers to “what people are thinking,” he is aware that Hobbes more or less maintains the Ockham (or ‘Occam,’ in Grice’s preferred spelling) paradigm, both in his work written in his late scholastic Latin (“Computatio, sive logica”) and the vernacular (“Leviathan”) which almost marks the beginning of so-called, by Sorley, “English philosophy.”  With the coming of empiricism, with Locke’s Essay (1690), and later Mill’s “System of Logic (mandatory reading at Oxford for the Lit. Hum. degree – “more Grice to the Mill,” Grice will put it) it seems obvious that the tradition in which Grice is immersed is not strange to ‘naturalism.’  “Nature” itself, as Plato already knew, need not be hypostasized. It is a fascinating fact that, for years, Oxford infamously kept two different chairs for the philosopher: one of ‘natural’ philosophy, and the Waynflete chair of ‘meta-physical philosophy,’ where ‘metaphysical’ is merely an obscure way of referring to the ‘trans-natural.’ Or is it the other way around?  Few empiricist philosophers need to postulate the ‘unity’ (less so, the uniformity) of “Nature,” even if this or that Griceians will later will. Witness Nancy Cartwright in the festschrift for Grice edited by Grandy and Warner for Clarendon, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends (or “G. R. I. C. E.,” for short): ‘how the laws of nature lie.’  In its simplest formulation, which should do for the purposes of this contribution, the philosophical thesis of ‘naturalism’ may be understood as positing an ontological continuum between this or that allegation concerning ‘Nature’ and what is not nature (‘art,’ as in ‘artifice’).  And then, Grice comes to revisit “Meaning.”  In 1976, Grice gets invited to a symposium at Brighton and resumes his 1948 vintage ‘natural’/‘non-natural’ distinction. He had more or less kept it all through the William James lectures. At Brighton, Grice adds some crucial elaborations, in terms of what he now calls ‘philosophical psychology’ (Surely he doesn’t want to be seen as a ‘scientific’ psychologist). The audience is a different one, and not purely philosophical, so he can be cavalier and provocative in a different way.  While in his talk on “Meaning” for the Oxford Philosophical Society Grice had, rather casually, referred to this or that application, collocation, or occurrence, of the lexeme ‘mean’ as being this or that (Fregeian) ‘sense’ of the lexeme ‘mean’ -- and thus yielding ‘mean’ as, strictly, polysemous -- he now feels it’s time to weaken the claim to this or that (Ryleian) ‘use,’ not (Fregeian) ‘sense,’ of “mean.”  His motivation is obvious, and can be brought back a point he makes in his third William James lectures, and which in fact underlies his philosophical methodology regarding other philosophers’ mistakes when dealing with this or that linguistic nuance. If you are going to be Occamist, ‘senses,’ as specific entities, are not be multiplied beyond necessity.’ Grice is playing the etymological game here, concerning ‘mean’ (mens, mind). His example, in “Meaning revisited,” concerns Smith as ‘being caught in the grip of a vyse/vice.’ The root in both ‘vice’ and ‘vyse’ – Latin ‘vim’ – is cognate with ‘violence’ and gives two lexemes in Grice’s vernacular: one applies to something like a carpenter’s tool, and the other to the opposite of a virtue. Grice wants to explore how the ‘natural’/ ‘non-natural’ distinction may compare to the ‘vyse’/‘vice’ distinction. With ‘vice,’ Grice suggests, we have, in his vernacular, as opposed to Latin, two different lexemes (even if ultimately from a common Latin root, ‘vim,’ which surely mitigates the case for polysemy). But with ‘mean,’ that’s surely that’s not the case. The ultimate root is that of ‘mens,’ mind, and there’s no spelling difference to deal with.  Grice does not reverse the order of the terms in his ‘natural’/’non-natural’ distinction, though, as Eco would (“a sign is something you can use to lie”). Rather, he allows for this or that loose, or figurative, or ‘disimplicatural’ use of “means ….” His craving for a further philosophical generality justifies his disimplicature. This generality is of two kinds, one of which he deem thems ‘conceptual,’ or ‘methodological,’ and the other ‘mythic.’  The ‘conceptual’ or methodological manoevure is ontological in flavour. If there is a common core that both our (i) and (ii) above share, it should be rephrasable by a neutral form for both the ‘natural’ and the ‘non-natural’ scenario:  ix.  p is a consequence of x/a  ‘Consequentia’ is exactly the term used by Hobbes (some would prefer post-sequentia) when considering the generic concept of a ‘sign.’ It is thus very apt of Hacking (in his “Why does language matter to philosophy?”) to see Hobbes as a pre-Griceian (or is it, Grice as a post-Hobbesian?)  When it comes to ‘naturalism’ proper, we have to be careful in our exegesis of it as label for this or that philosophical overarching thesis. When reminiscing about his progress to ‘The City of the Eternal Truth,’ in his parody of Bunyan’s, pilgrim Grice meets face to face with the monster of “Naturalism.”  One may see this as Grice’s warning against some trends he found in The New World, ‘the devil of scientism,’ as he called it, towards ‘reductionism’ and ‘eliminationism,’ as flourishing in the idea that a ‘final cause’ is ‘mechanistically reducible.’ In Grice’s philosophical psychology, ‘Naturalism’ for Grice, amounts to rejecting this or that psychological law when this or that physiological law already explains the same phenomenon. Grice finds that his Occamism for ‘mean’ is not enough here and fangles an ‘ontological marxism’: this or that entity (an autonomous rational soul, say) that seems to go against naturalism may be justified, ‘provided they help with the house-work’ the philosopher is engaged in, in this case, and into the bargain, saving the philosopher’s existence.  The spirit, however, if not the letter, of ‘naturalism’ as a grand philosophical thesis still survives. Grice regards himself as ultimately a ‘constructivist.’ The realm of his ‘non-natural’ needs to be rooted in a previous realm of the ‘natural.’ He suggest here a ‘genitorially justified’ ‘myth’ for the ‘natural’/‘non-natural’ distinction:  x.                  a meaninngNN that q derives from x meaningN that p  Grice is exploring ‘emergence’ as a viable concept in philosophical psychology. Philosophical psychology is thus rooted in philosophical ethology. This or that psychological (or souly) state, (or attitude, or stance) may be understood as emerging from (or supervening on) a mere biological and ultimately physical (i. e. natural) state. (He is clear about that in his “Intention and uncertainty,” when, adopting the concept of ‘willing that’ from Prichard, he allows it to be amenable to a ‘physicalist’ treatment).  In his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, Grice feels the need to creates a new philosophical sub-discipline, which he, echoing Carnap, christens ‘pirotology.’  Grice’s ‘pirotology’ concern Carnap’s ‘pirot,’ that ‘karulises elatically’ in his “Introduction to Semantics.” Grice adds a nod to Locke’s reflection on Prince Maurice’s ‘parot’ being “very intelligent, and rational.” The pirotological justification of the ‘natural’/‘non-natural’ distinction involves three stages.  The first stage in the sequence or series involves the pirot, P1, as a merely physical (or purely ‘natural’) entity, P1.  The second stage involves our ‘natural’ pirot giving way to the emergence, pretty much alla Nicolai Hartmann, of a now bio-logical pirot P2 (a ‘human’), endowed with the goal of survival and adaptation to its natural environment.  The third and last stage sees our P2 ‘re-constituting’ itself as now a psycho-logical pirot P3, as a ‘person’, endowed with a higher type of ‘soul.’ (Grice is following Aristotle’s progression in “De anima.”  Grice carefully avoids the use of ‘mind,’ in what he felt was an over-use by philosophers in the discipline of ‘mental philosophy,’ as it is referred to at Oxford in connection with Wilde. As a Kantotelian, Grice sees the biological pirot P2 as having a ‘soul,’ even if not a rational one. Grice was fascinated by Aristotle’s insight that, ‘soul,’ like ‘figure’ or ‘number,’ is a concept that cannot be defined by ‘genus,’ but only within this or that ‘series,’ such as the three-stage one he provides from the ‘natural’ to the ‘non-natural’ pirot.  It is thus no easy exegetic task to make sense of Grice’s somewhat rhetorical antipathy towards ‘Naturalism,’ but I shall leave that as an open question.  Beyond the distinction?  In the end, for Grice, the key-word is not ‘culture,’ as opposed to ‘nature,’ but ‘rationality,’ as displayed by our ‘non-natural’ pirot P3. Rationality becomes the philosopher’s main concern, as it is conceptualized to develop from this or that pre-rational propension, which is biological and ultimately physical, i.e. natural.  Grice’s exploration on the ‘natural’/ ‘non-natural’ distinction thus agrees with a very naturalistic approaches to things like adaptation and survival in a natural environment, and the evolution of altruism (a ‘talking pirot’ who transfers his psychological attitude to another pirot).  While his tone remains distinctively philosophical – and indeed displaying what he thought as a bit of ‘irreverent, conservative, dissenting rationalism,’ by his example he has indeed shown that the philosopher’s say has a relevance that no other discipline can provide. REFERENCES  Grice, H. P. (1948). ‘Meaning,’ repr. in Studies in the Way of Words.  Grice, H. P. (1975). ‘Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre,’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, repr. in Grice, 1991.  Grice, H. P. (1976). ‘Meaning revisited,’ repr. in Studies in the Way of Words.  Grice, H. P. (1986). ‘Reply to Richards,’ in Richard Grandy and Richard Warner, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends. Oxord: The Clarendon Press.  Grice, H. P. (1991). The conception of value. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.  Hacking, I. M. (1977). Why does language matter to philosophy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Hobbes, Thomas. Computatio sive logica.  Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan.  Locke, John. A theory concerning humane [sic] understanding.  Mellor, D. H. (n.d.) ‘Causes of deaths of philosophers’ (accessed February 20th, 2020) https://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/people/teaching-research-pages/mellor/dhm11/deaths-dg.html  Mill, J. S. A system of logic. London: Macmillan.  Ockham, William. Theory of signs.  Pietarinen, Ahti-Veikko and Francesco Bellucci (2016). ‘H. Paul Grice’s Lecture Notes on Charles S. Peirce’s Theory of Signs,’ International Review of Pragmatics, 8(1):82-129.  Sorley, W. R. (1920). A history of English philosophy. Cambridge. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Natural and non-natural, and naturalism.”

natural intelligence -- artificial (or non-natural) intelligence, also called AI, the scientific effort to design and build intelligent artifacts. Grice disliked the phrase “artificial intelligence.” “Strictly, what Minsky means is ‘non-natural’ intelligence.’”Since the effort inevitably presupposes and tests theories about the nature of intelligence, it has implications for the philosophy of mind  perhaps even more than does empirical psychology. For one thing, actual construction amounts to a direct assault on the mindbody problem; should it succeed, some form of materialism would seem to be vindicated. For another, a working model, even a limited one, requires a more global conception of what intelligence is than do experiments to test specific hypotheses. In fact, psychology’s own overview of its domain Arouet, François-Marie artificial intelligence 53   53 has been much influenced by fundamental concepts drawn from AI. Although the idea of an intelligent artifact is old, serious scientific research dates only from the 0s, and is associated with the development of programmable computers. Intelligence is understood as a structural property or capacity of an active system; i.e., it does not matter what the system is made of, as long as its parts and their interactions yield intelligent behavior overall. For instance, if solving logical problems, playing chess, or conversing in English manifests intelligence, then it is not important whether the “implementation” is electronic, biological, or mechanical, just as long as it solves, plays, or talks. Computers are relevant mainly because of their flexibility and economy: software systems are unmatched in achievable active complexity per invested effort. Despite the generality of programmable structures and the variety of historical approaches to the mind, the bulk of AI research divides into two broad camps  which we can think of as language-oriented and pattern-oriented, respectively. Conspicuous by their absence are significant influences from the conditionedresponse paradigm, the psychoanalytic tradition, the mental picture idea, empiricist atomistic associationism, and so on. Moreover, both AI camps tend to focus on cognitive issues, sometimes including perception and motor control. Notably omitted are such psychologically important topics as affect, personality, aesthetic and moral judgment, conceptual change, mental illness, etc. Perhaps such matters are beyond the purview of artificial intelligence; yet it is an unobvious substantive thesis that intellect can be cordoned off and realized independently of the rest of human life. The two main AI paradigms emerged together in the 0s along with cybernetic and information-theoretic approaches, which turned out to be dead ends; and both are vigorous today. But for most of the sixties and seventies, the language-based orientation dominated attention and funding, for three signal reasons. First, computer data structures and processes themselves seemed languagelike: data were syntactically and semantically articulated, and processing was localized serial. Second, twentieth-century linguistics and logic made it intelligible that and how such systems might work: automatic symbol manipulation made clear, powerful sense. Finally, the sorts of performance most amenable to the approach  explicit reasoning and “figuring out”  strike both popular and educated opinion as particularly “intellectual”; hence, early successes were all the more impressive, while “trivial” stumbling blocks were easier to ignore. The basic idea of the linguistic or symbol manipulation camp is that thinking is like talking  inner discourse  and, hence, that thoughts are like sentences. The suggestion is venerable; and Hobbes even linked it explicitly to computation. Yet, it was a major scientific achievement to turn the general idea into a serious theory. The account does not apply only, or even especially, to the sort of thinking that is accessible to conscious reflection. Nor is the “language of thought” supposed to be much like English, predicate logic, LISP, or any other familiar notation; rather, its detailed character is an empirical research problem. And, despite fictional stereotypes, the aim is not to build superlogical or inhumanly rational automata. Our human tendencies to take things for granted, make intuitive leaps, and resist implausible conclusions are not weaknesses that AI strives to overcome but abilities integral to real intelligence that AI aspires to share. In what sense, then, is thought supposed to be languagelike? Three items are essential. First, thought tokens have a combinatorial syntactic structure; i.e., they are compounds of welldefined atomic constituents in well-defined recursively specifiable arrangements. So the constituents are analogous to words, and the arrangements are analogous to phrases and sentences; but there is no supposition that they should resemble any known words or grammar. Second, the contents of thought tokens, what they “mean,” are a systematic function of their composition: the constituents and forms of combination have determinate significances that together determine the content of any wellformed compound. So this is like the meaning of a sentence being determined by its grammar and the meanings of its words. Third, the intelligent progress or sequence of thought is specifiable by rules expressed syntactically  they can be carried out by processes sensitive only to syntactic properties. Here the analogy is to proof theory: the formal validity of an argument is a matter of its according with rules expressed formally. But this analogy is particularly treacherous, because it immediately suggests the rigor of logical inference; but, if intelligence is specifiable by formal rules, these must be far more permissive, context-sensitive, and so on, than those of formal logic. Syntax as such is perfectly neutral as to how the constituents are identified by sound, by artificial intelligence artificial intelligence 54   54 shape, by magnetic profile and arranged in time, in space, via address pointers. It is, in effect, a free parameter: whatever can serve as a bridge between the semantics and the processing. The account shares with many others the assumptions that thoughts are contentful meaningful and that the processes in which they occur can somehow be realized physically. It is distinguished by the two further theses that there must be some independent way of describing these thoughts that mediates between simultaneously determines their contents and how they are processed, and that, so described, they are combinatorially structured. Such a description is syntactical. We can distinguish two principal phases in language-oriented AI, each lasting about twenty years. Very roughly, the first phase emphasized processing search and reasoning, whereas the second has emphasized representation knowledge. To see how this went, it is important to appreciate the intellectual breakthrough required to conceive AI at all. A machine, such as a computer, is a deterministic system, except for random elements. That is fine for perfectly constrained domains, like numerical calculation, sorting, and parsing, or for domains that are constrained except for prescribed randomness, such as statistical modeling. But, in the general case, intelligent behavior is neither perfectly constrained nor perfectly constrained with a little random variation thrown in. Rather, it is generally focused and sensible, yet also fallible and somewhat variable. Consider, e.g., chess playing an early test bed for AI: listing all the legal moves for any given position is a perfectly constrained problem, and easy to program; but choosing the best move is not. Yet an intelligent player does not simply determine which moves would be legal and then choose one randomly; intelligence in chess play is to choose, if not always the best, at least usually a good move. This is something between perfect determinacy and randomness, a “between” that is not simply a mixture of the two. How is it achievable in a machine? The crucial innovation that first made AI concretely and realistically conceivable is that of a heuristic procedure. The term ‘heuristic’ derives from the Grecian word for discovery, as in Archimedes’ exclamation “Eureka!” The relevant point for AI is that discovery is a matter neither of following exact directions to a goal nor of dumb luck, but of looking around sensibly, being guided as much as possible by what you know in advance and what you find along the way. So a heuristic procedure is one for sensible discovery, a procedure for sensibly guided search. In chess, e.g., a player does well to bear in mind a number of rules of thumb: other things being equal, rooks are more valuable than knights, it is an asset to control the center of the board, and so on. Such guidelines, of course, are not valid in every situation; nor will they all be best satisfied by the same move. But, by following them while searching as far ahead through various scenarios as possible, a player can make generally sensible moves  much better than random  within the constraints of the game. This picture even accords fairly well with the introspective feel of choosing a move, particularly for less experienced players. The essential insight for AI is that such roughand-ready ceteris paribus rules can be deterministically programmed. It all depends on how you look at it. One and the same bit of computer program can be, from one point of view, a deterministic, infallible procedure for computing how a given move would change the relative balance of pieces, and from another, a generally sensible but fallible procedure for estimating how “good” that move would be. The substantive thesis about intelligence  human and artificial alike  then is that our powerful but fallible ability to form “intuitive” hunches, educated guesses, etc., is the result of largely unconscious search, guided by such heuristic rules. The second phase of language-inspired AI, dating roughly from the mid-0s, builds on the idea of heuristic procedure, but dramatically changes the emphasis. The earlier work was framed by a conception of intelligence as finding solutions to problems good moves, e.g.. From such a perspective, the specification of the problem the rules of the game plus the current position and the provision of some heuristic guides domain-specific rules of thumb are merely a setting of the parameters; the real work, the real exercise of intelligence, lies in the intensive guided search undertaken in the specified terms. The later phase, impressed not so much by our problem-solving prowess as by how well we get along with “simple” common sense, has shifted the emphasis from search and reasoning to knowledge. The motivation for this shift can be seen in the following two sentences: We gave the monkey the banana because it was ripe. We gave the monkey the banana because it was hungry. artificial intelligence artificial intelligence 55   55 The word ‘it’ is ambiguous, as the terminal adjectives make clear. Yet listeners effortlessly understand what is meant, to the point, usually, of not even noticing the ambiguity. The question is, how? Of course, it is “just common sense” that monkeys don’t get ripe and bananas don’t get hungry, so . . . But three further observations show that this is not so much an answer as a restatement of the issue. First, sentences that rely on common sense to avoid misunderstanding are anything but rare: conversation is rife with them. Second, just about any odd fact that “everybody knows” can be the bit of common sense that understanding the next sentence depends on; and the range of such knowledge is vast. Yet, third, dialogue proceeds in real time without a hitch, almost always. So the whole range of commonsense knowledge must be somehow at our mental fingertips all the time. The underlying difficulty is not with speed or quantity alone, but with relevance. How does a system, given all that it knows about aardvarks, Alabama, and ax handles, “home in on” the pertinent fact that bananas don’t get hungry, in the fraction of a second it can afford to spend on the pronoun ‘it’? The answer proposed is both simple and powerful: common sense is not just randomly stored information, but is instead highly organized by topics, with lots of indexes, cross-references, tables, hierarchies, and so on. The words in the sentence itself trigger the “articles” on monkeys, bananas, hunger, and so on, and these quickly reveal that monkeys are mammals, hence animals, that bananas are fruit, hence from plants, that hunger is what animals feel when they need to eat  and that settles it. The amount of search and reasoning is minimal; the issue of relevance is solved instead by the antecedent structure in the stored knowledge itself. While this requires larger and more elaborate systems, the hope is that it will make them faster and more flexible. The other main orientation toward artificial intelligence, the pattern-based approach  often called “connectionism” or “parallel distributed processing”  reemerged from the shadow of symbol processing only in the 0s, and remains in many ways less developed. The basic inspiration comes not from language or any other psychological phenomenon such as imagery or affect, but from the microstructure of the brain. The components of a connectionist system are relatively simple active nodes  lots of them  and relatively simple connections between those nodes  again, lots of them. One important type and the easiest to visualize has the nodes divided into layers, such that each node in layer A is connected to each node in layer B, each node in layer B is connected to each node in layer C, and so on. Each node has an activation level, which varies in response to the activations of other, connected nodes; and each connection has a weight, which determines how strongly and in what direction the activation of one node affects that of the other. The analogy with neurons and synapses, though imprecise, is intended. So imagine a layered network with finely tuned connection weights and random or zero activation levels. Now suppose the activations of all the nodes in layer A are set in some particular way  some pattern is imposed on the activation state of this layer. These activations will propagate out along all the connections from layer A to layer B, and activate some pattern there. The activation of each node in layer B is a function of the activations of all the nodes in layer A, and of the weights of all the connections to it from those nodes. But since each node in layer B has its own connections from the nodes in layer A, it will respond in its own unique way to this pattern of activations in layer A. Thus, the pattern that results in layer B is a joint function of the pattern that was imposed on layer A and of the pattern of connection weights between the two layers. And a similar story can be told about layer B’s influence on layer C, and so on, until some final pattern is induced in the last layer. What are these patterns? They might be any number of things; but two general possibilities can be distinguished. They might be tantamount to or substrata beneath representations of some familiar sort, such as sentencelike structures or images; or they might be a kind or kinds of representation previously unknown. Now, people certainly do sometimes think in sentences and probably images; so, to the extent that networks are taken as complete brain models, the first alternative must be at least partly right. But, to that extent, the models are also more physiological than psychological: it is rather the implemented sentences or images that directly model the mind. Thus, it is the possibility of a new genus of representation  sometimes called distributed representation  that is particularly exciting. On this alternative, the patterns in the mind represent in some way other than by mimetic imagery or articulate description. How? An important feature of all network models is that there are two quite different categories of pattern. On the one hand, there are the relatively ephemeral patterns of activation in various artificial intelligence artificial intelligence 56   56 groups of nodes; on the other, there are the relatively stable patterns of connection strength among the nodes. Since there are in general many more connections than nodes, the latter patterns are richer; and it is they that determine the capabilities of the network with regard to the former patterns. Many of the abilities most easily and “naturally” realized in networks can be subsumed under the heading pattern completion: the connection weights are adjusted  perhaps via a training regime  such that the network will complete any of the activation patterns from a predetermined group. So, suppose some fraction say half of the nodes in the net are clamped to the values they would have for one of those patterns say P while the remainder are given random or default activations. Then the network, when run, will reset the latter activations to the values belonging to P  thus “completing” it. If the unclamped activations are regarded as variations or deviations, pattern completion amounts to normalization, or grouping by similarity. If the initial or input nodes are always the same as in layered networks, then we have pattern association or transformation from input to output. If the input pattern is a memory probe, pattern completion becomes access by content. If the output pattern is an identifier, then it is pattern recognition. And so on. Note that, although the operands are activation patterns, the “knowledge” about them, the ability to complete them, is contained in the connection patterns; hence, that ability or know-how is what the network represents. There is no obvious upper bound on the possible refinement or intricacy of these pattern groupings and associations. If the input patterns are sensory stimuli and the output patterns are motor control, then we have a potential model of coordinated and even skillful behavior. In a system also capable of language, a network model or component might account for verbal recognition and content association, and even such “nonliteral” effects as trope and tone. Yet at least some sort of “symbol manipulation” seems essential for language use, regardless of how networklike the implementation is. One current speculation is that it might suffice to approximate a battery of symbolic processes as a special subsystem within a cognitive system that fundamentally works on quite different principles. The attraction of the pattern-based approach is, at this point, not so much actual achievement as it is promise  on two grounds. In the first place, the space of possible models, not only network topologies but also ways of construing the patterns, is vast. Those built and tested so far have been, for practical reasons, rather small; so it is possible to hope beyond their present limitations to systems of significantly greater capability. But second, and perhaps even more attractive, those directions in which patternbased systems show the most promise  skills, recognition, similarity, and the like  are among the areas of greatest frustration for languagebased AI. Hence it remains possible, for a while at least, to overlook the fact that, to date, no connectionist network can perform long division, let alone play chess or solve symbolic logic problems. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Intelligence: natural and non-natural.”

natural life -- artificial life, an interdisciplinary science studying the most general character of the fundamental processes of life. These processes include self-organization, self-reproduction, learning, adaptation, and evolution. Artificial life or ALife is to theoretical biology roughly what artificial intelligence AI is to theoretical psychology  computer simulation is the methodology of choice. In fact, since the mind exhibits many of life’s fundamental properties, AI could be considered a subfield of ALife. However, whereas most traditional AI models are serial systems with complicated, centralized controllers making decisions based on global state information, most natural systems exhibiting complex autonomous behavior are parallel, distributed networks of simple entities making decisions based solely on their local state information, so typical ALife models have a corresponding distributed architecture. A computer simulation of evolving “bugs” can illustrate what ALife models are like. Moving around in a two-dimensional world periodically laden with heaps of “food,” these bugs eat, reproduce, and sometimes perish from starvation. Each bug’s movement is genetically determined by the quantities of food in its immediate neighborhood, and random mutations and crossovers modify these genomes during reproduction. Simulations started with random genes show spontaneous waves of highly adaptive genetic novelties continuously sweeping through the population at precisely quantifiable rates.C. Langston et al., eds., Artificial Life II 1. artificial language artificial life 57   57 ALife science raises and promises to inform many philosophical issues, such as: Is functionalism the right approach toward life? When, if ever, is a simulation of life really alive? When do systems exhibit the spontaneous emergence of properties?  Refs.: Grice: “Life: natural and non-natural.”

naturalism, the twofold view that 1 everything is composed of natural entities  those studied in the sciences on some versions, the natural sciences  whose properties determine all the properties of things, persons included abstracta like possibilia and mathematical objects, if they exist, being constructed of such abstract entities as the sciences allow; and 2 acceptable methods of justification and explanation are continuous, in some sense, with those in science. Clause 1 is metaphysical or ontological, clause 2 methodological and/or epistemological. Often naturalism is formulated only for a specific subject matter or domain. Thus ethical naturalism holds that moral properties are equivalent to or at least determined by certain natural properties, so that moral judgments either form a subclass of, or are non-reductively determined by the factual or descriptive judgments, and the appropriate methods of moral justification and explanation are continuous with those in science. Aristotle and Spinoza sometimes are counted among the ancestors of naturalism, as are Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Hobbes. But the major impetus to naturalism in the last two centuries comes from advances in science and the growing explanatory power they signify. By the 1850s, the synthesis of urea, reflections on the conservation of energy, work on “animal electricity,” and discoveries in physiology suggested to Feuerbach, L. Buchner, and others that all aspects of human beings are explainable in purely natural terms. Darwin’s theory had even greater impact, and by the end of the nineteenth century naturalist philosophies were making inroads where idealism once reigned unchallenged. Naturalism’s ranks now included H. Spencer, J. Tyndall, T. H. Huxley, W. K. Clifford, and E. Haeckel. Early in the twentieth century, Santayana’s naturalism strongly influenced a number of  philosophers, as did Dewey’s. Still other versions of naturalism flourished in America in the 0s and 0s, including those of R. W. Sellars and M. Cohen. Today most New-World philosophers of mind are naturalists of some stripe, largely because of what they see as the lessons of continuing scientific advances, some of them spectacular, particularly in the brain sciences. Nonetheless, twentieth-century philosophy has been largely anti-naturalist. Both phenomenology in the Husserlian tradition and analytic philosophy in the Fregean tradition, together with their descendants, have been united in rejecting psychologism, a species of naturalism according to which empirical discoveries about mental processes are crucial for understanding the nature of knowledge, language, and logic. In order to defend the autonomy of philosophy against inroads from descriptive science, many philosophers have tried to turn the tables by arguing for the priority of philosophy over science, hence over any of its alleged naturalist implications. Many continue to do so, often on the ground that philosophy alone can illuminate the normativity and intentionality involved in knowledge, language, and logic; or on the ground that philosophy can evaluate the normative and regulative presuppositions of scientific practice which science itself is either blind to or unequipped to analyze; or on the ground that phi- losophy understands how the language of science can no more be used to get outside itself than any other, hence can no more be known to be in touch with the world and ourselves than any other; or on the ground that would-be justifications of fundamental method, naturalist method certainly included, are necessarily circular because they must employ the very method at issue. Naturalists may reply by arguing that naturalism’s methodological clause 2 entails the opposite of dogmatism, requiring as it does an uncompromising fallibilism about philosophical matters that is continuous with the open, selfcritical spirit of science. If evidence were to accumulate against naturalism’s metaphysical clause 1, 1 would have to be revised or rejected, and there is no a priori reason such evidence could in principle never be found; indeed many naturalists reject the a priori altogether. Likewise, 2 itself might have to be revised or even rejected in light of adverse argument, so that in this respect 2 is self-referentially consistent. Until then, 2’s having survived rigorous criticism to date is justification enough, as is the case with hypotheses in science, which often are deployed without circularity in the course of their own evaluation, whether positive or negative H. I. Brown, “Circular Justifications,” 4. So too can language be used without circularity in expressing hypotheses about the relations between language and the prelinguistic world as illustrated by R. Millikan’s Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories, 4; cf. Post, “Epistemology,” 6. As for normativity and intentionality, naturalism does not entail materialism or physicalism, according to which everything is composed of the entities or processes studied in physics, and the properties of these basic physical affairs determine all the properties of things as in Quine. Some naturalists deny this, holding that more things than are dreamt of in physics are required to account for normativity and intentionality  and consciousness. Nor need naturalism be reductive, in the sense of equating every property with some natural property. Indeed many physicalists themselves explain how the physical, hence natural, properties of things might determine other, non-natural properties without being equivalent to them G. Hellman, T. Horgan, D. Lewis; see J. Post, The Faces of Existence, 7. Often the determining physical properties are not all properties of the thing x that has the non-natural properties, but include properties of items separated from x in space and time or in some cases bearing no physical relation to x that does any work in determining x’s properties Post, “ ‘Global’ Supervenient Determination: Too Permissive?” 5. Thus naturalism allows a high degree of holism and historicity, which opens the way for a non-reductive naturalist account of intentionality and normativity, such as Millikan’s, that is immune to the usual objections, which are mostly objections to reduction. The alternative psychosemantic theories of Dretske and Fodor, being largely reductive, remain vulnerable to such objections. In these and other ways non-reductive naturalism attempts to combine a monism of entities  the natural ones of which everything is composed  with a pluralism of properties, many of them irreducible or emergent. Not everything is nothing but a natural thing, nor need naturalism accord totalizing primacy to the natural face of existence. Indeed, some naturalists regard the universe as having religious and moral dimensions that enjoy a crucial kind of primacy; and some offer theologies that are more traditionally theist as do H. N. Wieman, C. Hardwick, J. Post. So far from exhibiting “reptilian indifference” to humans and their fate, the universe can be an enchanted place of belonging. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “My labour against Naturalism.”

naturalistic epistemology, an approach to epistemology that views the human subject as a natural phenomenon and uses empirical science to study epistemic activity. The phrase was introduced by Quine “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 9, who proposed that epistemology should be a chapter of psychology. Quine construed classical epistemology as Cartesian epistemology, an attempt to ground all knowledge in a firmly logical way on immediate experience. In its twentieth-century embodiment, it hoped to give a translation of all discourse and a deductive validation of all science in terms of sense experience, logic, and set theory. Repudiating this dream as forlorn, Quine urged that epistemology be abandoned and replaced by psychology. It would be a scientific study of how the subject takes sensory stimulations as input and delivers as output a theory of the three-dimensional world. This formulation appears to eliminate the normative mission of epistemology. In later writing, however, Quine has suggested that normative epistemology can be naturalized as a chapter of engineering: the technology of predicting experience, or sensory stimulations. Some theories of knowledge are naturalistic in their depiction of knowers as physical systems in causal interaction with the environment. One such theory is the causal theory of knowing, which says that a person knows that p provided his belief that p has a suitable causal connection with a corresponding state of affairs. Another example is the information-theoretic approach developed by Dretske Knowledge and the Flow of Information, 1. This says that a person knows that p only if some signal “carries” this information that p to him, where information is construed as an objective commodity that can be processed and transmitted via instruments, gauges, neurons, and the like. Information is “carried” from one site to another when events located at those sites are connected by a suitable lawful dependence. The normative concept of justification has also been the subject of naturalistic construals. Whereas many theories of justified belief focus on logical or probabilistic relations between evidence and hypothesis, naturalistic theories focus on the psychological processes causally responsible for the belief. The logical status of a belief does not fix its justificational status. Belief in a tautology, for instance, is not justified if it is formed by blind trust in an ignorant guru. According to Goldman Epistemology and Cognition, 6, a belief qualifies as justified only if it is produced by reliable belief-forming processes, i.e., processes that generally have a high truth ratio. Goldman’s larger program for naturalistic epistemology is called “epistemics,” an interdisciplinary enterprise in which cognitive science would play a major role. Epistemics would seek to identify the subset of cognitive operations available to the human cognizer that are best from a truth-bearing standpoint. Relevant truth-linked properties include problem-solving power and speed, i.e., the abilities to obtain correct answers to questions of interest and to do so quickly. Close connections between epistemology and artificial intelligence have been proposed by Clark Glymour, Gilbert Harman, John Pollock, and Paul Thagard. Harman stresses that principles of good reasoning are not directly given by rules of logic. Modus ponens, e.g., does not tell you to infer q if you already believe p and ‘if p then q’. In some cases it is better to subtract a belief in one of the premises rather than add a belief in q. Belief revision also requires attention to the storage and computational limitations of the mind. Limits of memory capacity, e.g., suggest a principle of clutter avoidance: not filling one’s mind with vast numbers of useless beliefs Harman, Change in View, 6. Other conceptions of naturalistic epistemology focus on the history of science. Larry Laudan conceives of naturalistic epistemology as a scientific inquiry that gathers empirical evidence concerning the past track records of various scientific methodologies, with the aim of determining which of these methodologies can best advance the chosen cognitive ends. Naturalistic epistemology need not confine its attention to individual epistemic agents; it can also study communities of agents. This perspective invites contributions from sciences that address the social side of the knowledge-seeking enterprise. If naturalistic epistemology is a normative inquiry, however, it must not simply naturalism, biological naturalistic epistemology 598    598 describe social practices or social influences; it must analyze the impact of these factors on the attainment of cognitive ends. Philosophers such as David Hull, Nicholas Rescher, Philip Kitcher, and Alvin Goldman have sketched models inspired by population biology and economics to explore the epistemic consequences of alternative distributions of research activity and different ways that professional rewards might influence the course of research. 

Lockeian ‘sort’ -- natural kind, a category of entities classically conceived as having modal implications; e.g., if Socrates is a member of the natural kind human being, then he is necessarily a human being. The idea that nature fixes certain sortals, such as ‘water’ and ‘human being’, as correct classifications that appear to designate kinds of entities has roots going back at least to Plato and Aristotle. Anil Gupta has argued that sortals are to be distinguished from properties designated by such predicates as ‘red’ by including criteria for individuating the particulars bits or amounts for mass nouns that fall under them as well as criteria for sorting those particulars into the class. Quine is salient among those who find the modal implications of natural kinds objectionable. He has argued that the idea of natural kinds is rooted in prescientific intuitive judgments of comparative similarity, and he has suggested that as these intuitive classifications are replaced by classifications based on scientific theories these modal implications drop away. Kripke and Putnam have argued that science in fact uses natural kind terms having the modal implications Quine finds so objectionable. They see an important role in scientific methodology for the capacity to refer demonstratively to such natural kinds by pointing out particulars that fall under them. Certain inferences within science  such as the inference to the charge for electrons generally from the measurement of the charge on one or a few electrons  seem to be additional aspects of a role for natural kind terms in scientific practice. Other roles in the methodology of science for natural kind concepts have been discussed in recent work by Ian Hacking and Thomas Kuhn. H. P. Grice: “Lockeian sorts: natural and non-natural.”

natural law, also called law of nature, in moral and political philosophy, an objective norm or set of objective norms governing human behavior, similar to the positive laws of a human ruler, but binding on all people alike and usually understood as involving a superhuman legislator. Ancient Grecian and Roman thought, particularly Stoicism, introduced ideas of eternal laws directing the actions of all rational beings and built into the very structure of the universe. Roman lawyers developed a doctrine of a law that all civilized peoples would recognize, and made some effort to explain it in terms of a natural law common to animals and humans. The most influential forms of natural law theory, however, arose from later efforts to use Stoic and legal language to work out a Christian theory of morality and politics. The aim was to show that the principles of morals could be known by reason alone, without revelation, so that the whole human race could know how to live properly. The law of nature applies, on this understanding, only to rational beings, who can obey or disobey it deliberately and freely. It is thus different in kind from the laws God laid down for the inanimate and irrational parts of creation. Natural law theorists often saw continuities and analogies between natural laws for humans and those for the rest of creation but did not confuse them. The most enduringly influential natural law writer was Aquinas. On his view God’s eternal reason ordains laws directing all things to act for the good of the community of the universe, the declaration of His own glory. Human reason can participate sufficiently in God’s eternal reason to show us the good of the human community. The natural law is thus our sharing in the eternal law in a way appropriate to our human nature. God lays down certain other laws through revelation; these divine laws point us toward our eternal goal. The natural law concerns our earthly good, and needs to be supplemented by human laws. Such laws can vary from community to community, but to be binding they must always stay within the limits of the law of nature. God engraved the most basic principles of the natural law in the minds of all people alike, but their detailed application takes reasoning powers that not everyone may have. Opponents of Aquinas  called voluntarists  argued that God’s will, not his intellect, is the source of law, and that God could have laid down different natural laws for us. Hugo Grotius rejected their position, but unlike Aquinas he conceived of natural law as meant not to direct us to bring about some definite common good but to set the limits on the ways in which each of us could properly pursue our own personal aims. This Grotian outlook was developed by Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke along voluntarist lines. Thomistic views continued to be expounded by Protestant as well as Roman Catholic writers until the end of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, while natural law theory remained central to Catholic teaching, it ceased to attract major new non-Catholic proponents. Natural law doctrine in both Thomistic and Grotian versions treats morality as basically a matter of compliance with law. Obligation and duty, obedience and disobedience, merit and guilt, reward and punishment, are central notions. Virtues are simply habits of following laws. Though the law is suited to our distinctive human nature and can be discovered by the proper use of reason, it is not a self-imposed law. In following it we are obeying God. Since the early eighteenth century, philosophical discussions of whether or not there is an objective morality have largely ceased to center on natural law. The idea remains alive, however, in jurisprudence. Natural law theories are opposed to legal positivism, the view that the only binding laws are those imposed by human sovereigns, who cannot be subject to higher legal constraints. Legal theorists arguing that there are rational objective limits to the legislative power of rulers often think of these limits in terms of natural law, even when their theories do not invoke or imply any of the religious aspects of earlier natural law positions. Refs.: N. Cartwright-Hampshire, “How the laws of phyiscs lie,” in P. G. R. I. C. E., without a response by H. P. Grice. (“That will not be feasible.”)

natural philosophy – Grice: “It’s funny: there are only three or four chairs of philosophy at Oxford and one had to be on ‘the trans-natural’ philosophy! Back in the day, I might just as well have to have attended the ‘natural’ philosophy lectures!” --  the study of nature or of the spatiotemporal world. This was regarded as a task for philosophy before the emergence of modern science, especially physics and astronomy, and the term is now only used with reference to premodern times. Philosophical questions about nature still remain, e.g., whether materialism is true, but they would usually be placed in metaphysics or in a branch of it that may be called philosophy of nature. Natural philosophy is not to be confused with metaphysical naturalism, which is the metaphysical view no part of science itself that all that there is is the spatiotemporal world and that the only way to study it is that of the empirical sciences. It is also not to be confused with natural theology, which also may be considered part of metaphysics. The Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy is the name of a chair at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford.  The Sedleian Chair was founded by Sir William Sedley who, by his will dated 20 October 1618, left the sum of £2,000 to the University of Oxford for purchase of lands for its endowment. Sedley's bequest took effect in 1621 with the purchase of an estate at Waddesdon in Buckinghamshire to produce the necessary income.  It is regarded as the oldest of Oxford's scientific chairs. Holders of the Sedleian Professorship have, since the mid 19th Century, worked in a range of areas of Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics. They are simultaneously elected to fellowships at Queen's College, Oxford.  The Sedleian Professors in the past century have been Augustus Love (1899-1940), who was distinguished for his work in the mathematical theory of elasticity, Sydney Chapman (1946-1953), who is renowned for his contributions to the kinetic theory of gases and solar-terrestrial physics, George Temple (1953-1968), who made significant contributions to mathematical physics and the theory of generalized functions, Brooke Benjamin (1979-1995), who did highly influential work in the areas of mathematical analysis and fluid mechanics, and Sir John Ball (1996-2019), who is distinguished for his work in the mathematical theory of elasticity, materials science, the calculus of variations, and infinite-dimensional dynamical systems. Refs.: H. P. Grice: “Oxford and the four Ws: Waynflete, White, Wykeham, and Wilde.”

natural religion, a term first occurring in the second half of the seventeenth century, used in three related senses, the most common being 1 a body of truths about God and our duty that can be discovered by natural reason. These truths are sufficient for salvation or according to some orthodox Christians would have been sufficient if Adam had not sinned. Natural religion in this sense should be distinguished from natural theology, which does not imply this. A natural religion may also be 2 one that has a human, as distinct from a divine, origin. It may also be 3 a religion of human nature as such, as distinguished from religious beliefs and practices that have been determined by local circumstances. Natural religion in the third sense is identified with humanity’s original religion. In all three senses, natural religion includes a belief in God’s existence, justice, benevolence, and providential government; in immortality; and in the dictates of common morality. While the concept is associated with deism, it is also sympathetically treated by Christian writers like Clarke, who argues that revealed religion simply restores natural religion to its original purity and adds inducements to compliance. The  Faculty of Medicine appoints an elector for the professorship of Human Anatomy and for the professorship of Pathology. The Board of Natural Science appoints one elector for the professorship of Pathology and two for the Lee's Readerships. The Board of Modern History appoints two electors for the Beit professorship and lectureship, and three for the Ford lectureship. The Board of Theology appoints three of the seven electors for the Speaker's lectureship in Biblical Studies. Three different Boards of Faculty appoint electors for the Wilde lectureship in Natural Religion.  Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Natural religion at Oxford – the Wilde and the Wilde.”

Necessitarianism: “An ugly word once used by Strawson in a tutorial!” – Grice. -- the doctrine that necessity is an objective feature of the world. Natural language permits speakers to express modalities: a state of affairs can be actual Paris’s being in France, merely possible chlorophyll’s making things blue, or necessary 2 ! 2 % 4. Anti-necessitarians believe that these distinctions are not grounded in the nature of the world. Some of them claim that the distinctions are merely verbal. Others, e.g., Hume, believed that psychological facts, like our expectations of future events, explain the idea of necessity. Yet others contend that the modalities reflect epistemic considerations; necessity reflects the highest level of an inquirer’s commitment. Some necessitarians believe there are different modes of metaphysical necessity, e.g., causal and logical necessity. Certain proponents of idealism believe that each fact is necessarily connected with every other fact so that the ultimate goal of scientific inquiry is the discovery of a completely rigorous mathematical system of the world.

Necessitas – necessarium -- necessity, a modal property attributable to a whole proposition dictum just when it is not possible that the proposition be false the proposition being de dicto necessary. Narrowly construed, a proposition P is logically necessary provided P satisfies certain syntactic conditions, namely, that P’s denial is formally self-contradictory. More broadly, P is logically necessary just when P satisfies certain semantic conditions, namely, that P’s denial is false, and P true, in all possible worlds. These semantic conditions were first suggested by Leibniz, refined by Vitters and Carnap, and fully developed as the possible worlds semantics of Kripke, Hintikka, et al., in the 0s. Previously, philosophers had to rely largely on intuition to determine the acceptability or otherwise of formulas involving the necessity operator, A, and were at a loss as to which of various axiomatic systems for modal logic, as developed in the 0s by C. I. Lewis, best captured the notion of logical necessity. There was much debate, for instance, over the characteristic NN thesis of Lewis’s system S4, namely, AP / A AP if P is necessary then it is necessarily necessary. But given a Leibnizian account of the truth conditions for a statement of the form Aa namely R1 that Aa is true provided a is true in all possible worlds, and R2 that Aa is false provided there is at least one possible world in which a is false, a proof can be constructed by reductio ad absurdum. For suppose that AP / AAP is false in some arbitrarily chosen world W. Then its antecedent will be true in W, and hence by R1 it follows a that P will be true in all possible worlds. But equally its consequent will be false in W, and hence by R2 AP will be false in at least one possible world, from which again by R2 it follows b that P will be false in at least one possible world, thus contradicting a. A similar proof can be constructed for the characteristic thesis of S5, namely, -A-P / A-A-P if P is possibly true then it is necessarily possible. Necessity is also attributable to a property F of an object O provided it is not possible that there is no possible world in which O exists and lacks F  F being de re necessary, internal or essential to O. For instance, the non-repeatable haecceitist property of being identical to O is de re necessary essential to O, and arguably the repeatable property of being extended is de re necessary to all colored objects. nĕcesse (arch. nĕcessum , I.v. infra: NECESVS, S. C. de Bacch. l. 4: necessus , Ter. Heaut. 2, 3, 119 Wagn. ad loc.; id. Eun. 5, 5, 28; Gell. 16, 8, 1; v. Lachm. ad Lucr. 6, 815), neutr. adj. (gen. necessis, Lucr. 6, 815 ex conj. Lachm.; cf. Munro ad loc.; elsewhere only nom. and acc. sing., and with esse or habere) [perh. Sanscr. naç, obtain; Gr. root ἐνεκ-; cf. ἀνάγκη; v. Georg Curtius Gr. Etym. 424]. I. Form necesse. A. Unavoidable, inevitable, indispensable, necessary (class.; cf.: opus, usus est) 1. With esse. a. With subject.-clause: “edocet quanto detrimento...necesse sit constare victoriam,” Caes. B. G. 7, 19: “necesse est eam, quae ... timere permultos,” Auct. Her. 4, 16, 23: emas, non quod opus est, sed quod necesse est, Cato ap. Sen. Ep. 94, 28: “nihil fit, quod necesse non fuerit,” Cic. Fat. 9, 17: “necesse est igitur legem haberi in rebus optimis,” id. Leg. 2, 5, 12; id. Verr 2, 3, 29, § 70. — b. With dat. (of the person, emphatic): nihil necesse est mihi de me ipso dicere, Cic. Sen. 9, 30: “de homine enim dicitur, cui necesse est mori,” id. Fat. 9, 17.— c. With ut and subj.: “eos necesse est ut petat,” Auct. Her. 4, 16, 23: “sed ita necesse fuisse, cum Demosthenes dicturus esset, ut concursus ex totā Graeciā fierent,” Cic. Brut. 84, 289; Sen. Ep. 78, 15: “hoc necesse est, ut, etc.,” Cic. de Or. 2, 29, 129; Sen. Q. N. 2, 14, 2: “neque necesse est, uti vos auferam,” Gell. 2, 29, 9: “necesse est semper, ut id ... per se significet,” Quint. 8, 6, 43.— d. With subj. alone: “haec autem oratio ... aut nulla sit necesse est, aut omnium irrisione ludatur,” Cic. de Or. 1, 12, 50: “istum condemnetis necesse est,” Cic. Verr. 2, 2, 18, § 45: “vel concidat omne caelum necesse est,” id. Tusc. 1, 23, 54: “si necesse est aliquid ex se magni boni pariat,” Lact. 3, 12, 7.— 2. With habere (class. only with inf.): “non habebimus necesse semper concludere,” Cic. Part. Or. 13, 47: “eo minus habeo necesse scribere,” id. Att. 10, 1, 4: “Oppio scripsi ne necesse habueris reddere,” id. ib. 16, 2, 5: “non verbum pro verbo necesse habui reddere,” id. Opt. Gen. Or. 5, 14: “non necesse habeo omnia pro meo jure agere,” Ter. Ad. 1, 1, 26; Quint. 11, 1, 74; Vulg. Matt. 14, 16: necesse habere with abl. (= egere; “late Lat.): non necesse habent sani medico,” Vulg. Marc. 2, 17.—In agreement with object of habere: “non habet rex sponsalia necesse,” Vulg. 1 Reg. 18, 25.— B. Needful, requisite, indispensable, necessary: “id quod tibi necesse minime fuit, facetus esse voluisti,” Cic. Sull. 7, 22.— II. Form necessum (mostly ante-class.). A. With subject.-clause: “foras necessum est, quicquid habeo, vendere,” Plaut. Stich. 1, 3, 66: quod sit necessum scire, Afran. ap. Charis. p. 186 P.: “nec tamen haec retineri hamata necessumst,” Lucr. 2, 468: “externa corpus de parte necessumst tundier,” id. 4, 933: “necessum est vorsis gladiis depugnarier,” Plaut. Cas. 2, 5, 36: “necessum est paucis respondere,” Liv. 34, 5: “num omne id aurum in ludos consumi necessum esset?” id. 39, 5: “tonsorem capiti non est adhibere necessum,” Mart. 6, 57, 3.— B. With dat.: “dicas uxorem tibi necessum esse ducere,” Plaut. Mil. 4, 3, 25.— C. With subj.: “unde anima, atque animi constet natura necessum est,” Lucr. 4, 120: “quare etiam nativa necessum est confiteare Haec eadem,” id. 5, 377. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “The may and the must,” “Ichthyological necessity.”

need – H. P. Grice, “Need,” cf. D. Wiggins, “Need.” “What Toby needs” Grice was also interested in the modal use of ‘need’. “You need to do it.” “ ‘Need,’ like ‘ought’ takes ‘to.’” “It’s very Anglo-Saxon.” “Or, rather non-Indo-European substratum!” As it is attested only in Germanic, Celtic, and Balto-Slavic, it might be non-PIE, from a regional substrate language.

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

abdicatum: negation: H. P. Grice, “Negation.” the logical operation on propositions that is indicated, e.g., by the prefatory clause ‘It is not the case that . . .’. Negation is standardly distinguished sharply from the operation on predicates that is called complementation and that is indicated by the prefix ‘non-’. Because negation can also be indicated by the adverb ‘not’, a distinction is often drawn between external negation, which is indicated by attaching the prefatory ‘It is not the case that . . .’ to an assertion, and internal negation, which is indicated by inserting the adverb ‘not’ along with, perhaps, nature, right of negation 601    601 grammatically necessary words like ‘do’ or ‘does’ into the assertion in such a way as to indicate that the adverb ‘not’ modifies the verb. In a number of cases, the question arises as to whether external and internal negation yield logically equivalent results. For example, ‘It is not the case that Santa Claus exists’ would seem obviously to be true, whereas ‘Santa Claus does not exist’ seems to some philosophers to presuppose what it denies, on the ground that nothing could be truly asserted of Santa Claus unless he existed.  Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Negation and privation;” H. P. Grice, “Lectures on negation.”

Nemesius: Grecian philosopher. His treatise on the soul, On the Nature of Man, tr. from Grecian into Latin by Alphanus of Salerno and Burgundio of Pisa c.1160, was attributed to Gregory of Nyssa in the Middle Ages, and enjoyed some authority; the treatise rejects Plato for underplaying the unity of soul and body, and Aristotle for making the soul essentially corporeal. The soul is selfsubsistent, incorporeal, and by nature immortal, but naturally suited for union with the body. Nemesius draws on Ammonius Saccas and Porphyry, as well as analogy to the union of divine and human nature in Christ, to explain the incorruptible soul’s perfect union with the corruptible body. His review of the powers of the soul draws especially on Galen on the brain. His view that rational creatures possess free will in virtue of their rationality influenced Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus.