liberatum: liberum arbitrium – vide ‘arbitrium’ How can arbitrium not
be free? Oddly this concerns rationality. For Grice, as for almost everyone, a
rational agent is an autonomous agent. Freewill is proved grammatically. The
Romans had a ‘modus deliberativus’, and even a ‘modus optativus’ (ortike
ktesis) “in imitationem Graecis.”If you utter “Close the door!” you rely on
free will. It would be otiose for a language or system of communication to have
as its goal to inform/get informed, and influence/being influenced if
determinism and fatalism were true. freedom:
Like identity, crucial in philosophy in covering everything. E cannot
communicate that p, unless E is FREE. An amoeba cannot communicate thatp. End
setting, unweighed rationality, rationality about the ends, autonomy. Grice was
especially concerned with Kants having brought back the old Greek idea of
eleutheria for philosophical discussion. Refs.: the obvious keywords are
“freedom” and “free,” but most of the material is in “Actions and events,” in PPQ,
and below under ‘kantianism’ – The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.Bratman, of
Stanford, much influenced by Grice (at Berkeley then) thanks to their
Hands-Across-the-Bay programme, helps us to understand this Pological
progression towards the idea of strong autonomy or freedom. Recall that Grices
Ps combine Lockes very intelligent parrots with Russells and Carnaps
nonsensical Ps of which nothing we are told other than they karulise
elatically. Grices purpose is to give a little thought to a question. What are the
general principles exemplified, in creature-construction, in progressing from
one type of P to a higher type? What kinds of steps are being made? The kinds
of step with which Grice deals are those which culminate in a licence to
include, within the specification of the content of the psychological state of
this or that type of P, a range of expressions which would be inappropriate
with respect to this lower-type P. Such expressions include this or that
connective, this or that quantifier, this or that temporal modifier, this or
that mode indicator, this or that modal operator, and (importantly) this or
that expression to refer to this or that souly state like … judges that … and … will that … This or
that expression, that is, the availability of which leads to the structural
enrichment of the specification of content. In general, these steps will be
ones by which this or that item or idea which has, initially, a legitimate
place outside the scope of this or that souly instantiable (or, if you will,
the expressions for which occur legitimately outside the scope of this or that
souly predicate) come to have a legitimate place within the scope of such an
instantiable, a step by which, one might say, this or that item or ideas comes
to be internalised. Grice is disposed to regard as prototypical the sort of
natural disposition or propension which Hume attributes to a person, and which
is very important to Hume, viz. the tendency of the soul to spread itself upon
objects, i.e. to project into the world items which, properly or primitively
considered, is a feature of this or that souly state. Grice sets out in stages
the application of aspects of the genitorial programme. We then start with a
zero-order, with a P equipped to satisfy unnested, or logically amorphous,
judging and willing, i.e. whose contents do not involve judging or willing. We
soon reach our first P, G1. It would be advantageous to a P0 if
it could have this or that judging and this or that willing, which relate to
its own judging or willing. Such G1 could be equipped to
control or regulate its own judgings and willings. It will presumably be
already constituted so as to conform to the law that, cæteris paribus, if it
wills that p and judge that ~p, if it can, it makes it the case that p in its
soul To give it some control over its judgings and willings, we need only
extend the application of this law to the Ps judging and willing. We equip the
P so that, cæteris paribus, if it wills that it is not the case that it wills
that p and it judges that they do will that p, if it can, it makes it the case
that it does not will that p. And we somehow ensure that sometimes it can do
this. It may be that the installation of this kind of control would go hand in
had with the installation of the capacity for evaluation. Now, unlike it is the
case with a G1, a G2s intentional effort depends on the motivational strength
of its considered desire at the time of action. There is a process by which
this or that conflicting considered desire motivates action as a broadly causal
process, a process that reveals motivational strength. But a G2 might itself
try to weigh considerations provided by such a conflicting desire B1 and B2 in
deliberation about this or that pro and this or that con of various
alternatives. In the simplest case, such weighing treats each of the things
desired as a prima facie justifying end. In the face of conflict, it weighs
this and that desired end, where the weights correspond to the motivational
strength of the associated considered desire. The outcome of such deliberation,
Aristotle’s prohairesis, matches the outcome of the causal motivational process
envisioned in the description of G2. But, since the weights it
invokes in such deliberation correspond to the motivational strength of this or
that relevant considered desire (though perhaps not to the motivational
strength of this or that relevant considered desire), the resultant activitiy
matches those of a corresponding G2 (each of whose desires, we
are assuming, are considered). To be more realistic, we might limit ourselves
to saying that a P2 has the capacity to make the transition
from this or that unconsidered desire to this or that considered desire, but
does not always do this. But it will keep the discussion more manageable to
simplify and to suppose that each desire is considered. We shall not want this
G2 to depend, in each will and act in ways that reveal the motivational
strength of this or that considered desire at the time of action, but for a G3 it
will also be the case that in this or that, though not each) case, it acts on
the basis of how it weights this or that end favoured by this or that
conflicting considered desire. This or that considered desire will concern
matters that cannot be achieved simply by action at a single time. E. g. G3 may
want to nurture a vegetable garden, or build a house. Such matters will require
organized and coordinated action that extends over time. What the G3 does now
will depend not only on what it now desires but also on what it now expects it
will do later given what it does now. It needs a way of settling now what it
will do later given what it does now. The point is even clearer when we remind
ourselves that G3 is not alone. It is, we may assume, one of some number of G3;
and in many cases it needs to coordinate what it does with what other G3 do so
as to achieve ends desired by all participants, itself included. These
costs are magnified for G4 whose various plans are interwoven so that a change
in one element can have significant ripple effects that will need to be
considered. Let us suppose that the general strategies G4 has for responding to
new information about its circumstances are sensitive to these kinds of costs.
Promoting in the long run the satisfaction of its considered desires and preferences.
G4 is a somewhat sophisticated planning agent but it has a
problem. It can expect that its desires and preferences may well change over
time and undermine its efforts at organizing and coordinating its activities
over time. Perhaps in many cases this is due to the kind of temporal
discounting. So for example G4 may have a plan to exercise every day but may
tend to prefer a sequence of not exercising on the present day but exercising
all days in the future, to a uniform sequence the present day included. At the
end of the day it returns to its earlier considered preference in favour of
exercising on each and every day. Though G4, unlike G3, has the
capacity to settle on prior plans or plaices concerning exercise, this capacity
does not yet help in such a case. A creature whose plans were stable in ways in
part shaped by such a no-regret principle would be more likely than G4 to
resist temporary temptations. So let us build such a principle into the
stability of the plans of a G5, whose plans and policies are not derived solely
from facts about its limits of time, attention, and the like. It is also
grounded in the central concerns of a planning agent with its own future,
concerns that lend special significance to anticipated future regret. So let us
add to G5 the capacity and disposition to arrive at such hierarchies of
higher-order desires concerning its will. This gives us creature G6. There
is a problem with G6, one that has been much discussed. It is not clear why a
higher-order desire ‒ even a higher-order desire that a certain
desire be ones will ‒ is not simply one more desire in the pool of
desires (Berkeley Gods will problem). Why does it have the authority to
constitute or ensure the agents (i. e. the creatures) endorsement or rejection
of a first-order desire? Applied to G6 this is the question of whether, by
virtue solely of its hierarchies of desires, it really does succeed in taking
its own stand of endorsement or rejection of various first-order desires. Since
it was the ability to take its own stand that we are trying to provide in the
move to P6, we need some response to this challenge. The basic point
is that G6 is not merely a time-slice agent. It is, rather, and
understands itself to be, a temporally persisting planning agent, one who begins,
and continues, and completes temporally extended projects. On a broadly Lockean
view, its persistence over time consists in relevant psychological continuities
(e.g., the persistence of attitudes of belief and intention) and connections
(e.g., memory of a past event, or the later intentional execution of an
intention formed earlier). Certain attitudes have as a primary role the
constitution and support of such Lockean continuities and connections. In
particular, policies that favour or reject various desires have it as their
role to constitute and support various continuities both of ordinary desires
and of the politicos themselves. For this reason such policies are not merely
additional wiggles in the psychic stew. Instead, these policies have a claim to
help determine where the agent ‒ i.e., the temporally persisting agent ‒
stands with respect to its desires, or so it seems to me reasonable to say. The
psychology of G7 continues to have the hierarchical structure of pro-attitudes
introduced with G6. The difference is that the higher-order pro-attitudes of G6
were simply characterized as desires in a broad, generic sense, and no appeal
was made to the distinctive species of pro-attitude constituted by plan-like
attitudes. That is the sense in which the psychology of G7 is an extension of
the psychology of G6. Let us then give G7 such higher-order policies with the
capacity to take a stand with respect to its desires by arriving at relevant
higher-order policies concerning the functioning of those desires over time. G7 exhibits
a merger of hierarchical and planning structures. Appealing to planning theory
and ground in connection to the temporally extended structure of agency to be
ones will. G7 has higher-order policies that favour or challenge motivational
roles of its considered desires. When G7 engages in deliberative weighing of
conflicting, desired ends it seems that the assigned weights should reflect the
policies that determine where it stands with respect to relevant desires. But
the policies we have so far appealed to ‒ policies concerning what desires are
to be ones will ‒ do not quite address this concern. The problem is that one
can in certain cases have policies concerning which desires are to motivate and
yet these not be policies that accord what those desires are for a
corresponding justifying role in deliberation. G8. A solution is to give our
creature, G8, the capacity to arrive at policies that express
its commitment to be motivated by a desire by way of its treatment of that
desire as providing, in deliberation, a justifying end for action. G8 has
policies for treating (or not treating) certain desires as providing justifying
ends, as, in this way, reason-providing, in motivationally effective
deliberation. Let us call such policies self-governing policies. We will
suppose that these policies are mutually compatible and do not challenge each
other. In this way G8 involves an extension of structures already present in
G7. The grounds on which G8 arrives at (and on occasion revises) such self-governing
policies will be many and varied. We can see these policies as crystallizing
complex pressures and concerns, some of which are grounded in other policies or
desires. These self-governing policies may be tentative and will normally not
be immune to change. If we ask what G8 values in this case, the answer seems to
be: what it values is constituted in part by its higher-order self-governing
policies. In particular, it values exercise over nonexercise even right now,
and even given that it has a considered, though temporary, preference to the
contrary. Unlike lower Ps, what P8 now values is not simply a
matter of its present, considered desires and preferences. Now this model of P8
seems in relevant aspects to be a partial) model of us, in our better moments,
of course. So we arrive at the conjecture that one important kind of valuing of
which we are capable involves, in the cited ways, both our first-order desires
and our higher order self-governing policies. In an important sub-class of
cases our valuing involves reflexive polices that are both first-order policies
of action and higher-order policies to treat the first-order policy as reason
providing in motivationally effective deliberation. This may seem odd. Valuing
seems normally to be a first-order attitude. One values honesty, say. The
proposal is that an important kind of valuing involves higher-order policies.
Does this mean that, strictly speaking, what one values (in this sense) is
itself a desire ‒ not honesty, say, but a desire for honesty? No, it does not.
What I value in the present case is honesty; but, on the theory, my valuing
honesty in art consists in certain higher-order self-governing policies. An
agents reflective valuing involves a kind of higher-order willing. Freud
challenged the power structure of the soul in Plato: it is the libido that
takes control, not the logos. Grice takes up this polemic. Aristotle takes up
Platos challenge, each type of soul is united to the next by the idea of life.
The animal soul, between the vegetative and the rational, is not detachable.
Grice’s
Freudian slip:
Grice thought that the idea of a Freudian slip was ‘ridiculous,’ – for Grice
‘mean’ is intentional, unless it is used metaphorically, for ‘dark clouds mean
rain.’ Since his interest is in ‘communicate,’ surely the ‘slipper’ (R. lapsus
linguae) cannot ‘communicate.’ “What bothers me most is Freudian convoluted
attempts to have this, as Lacan will, as the libido saying this or that!” -- Austrian
neurologist and psychologist, the founder of psychoanalysis. Starting with the
study of hysteria in late nineteenth-century Vienna, Freud developed a theory
of the mind that has come to dominate modern thought. His notions of the
unconscious, of a mind divided against itself, of the meaningfulness of apparently
meaningless activity, of the displacement and transference of feelings, of
stages of psychosexual development, of the pervasiveness and importance of
sexual motivation, as well as of much else, have helped shape modern
consciousness. His language and that of his translators, whether specifying
divisions of the mind e.g. id, ego, and superego, types of disorder e.g.
obsessional neurosis, or the structure of experience e.g. Oedipus complex,
narcissism, has become the language in which we describe and understand
ourselves and others. As the poet W. H. Auden wrote on the occasion of Freud’s
death, “if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, / to us he is no more a
person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our
different lives. . . .” Hysteria is a disorder involving organic symptoms with
no apparent organic cause. Following early work in neurophysiology, Freud in
collaboration with Josef Breuer came to the view that “hysterics suffer mainly
from reminiscences,” in particular buried memories of traumatic experiences,
the strangulated affect of which emerged in conversion hysteria in the
distorted form of physical symptoms. Treatment involved the recovery of the
repressed memories to allow the cathartic discharge or abreaction of the
previously displaced and strangulated affect. This provided the background for
Freud’s seduction theory, which traced hysterical symptoms to traumatic
prepubertal sexual assaults typically by fathers. But Freud later abandoned the
seduction theory because the energy assumptions were problematic e.g., if the
only energy involved was strangulated affect from long-past external trauma,
why didn’t the symptom successfully use up that energy and so clear itself up?
and because he came to see that fantasy could have the same effects as memory
of actual events: “psychical reality was of more importance than material
reality.” What was repressed was not memories, but desires. He came to see the
repetition of symptoms as fueled by internal, in particular sexual, energy.
While it is certainly true that Freud saw the Frege-Geach point Freud, Sigmund
331 331 working of sexuality almost
everywhere, it is not true that he explained everything in terms of sexuality
alone. Psychoanalysis is a theory of internal psychic conflict, and conflict
requires at least two parties. Despite developments and changes, Freud’s
instinct theory was determinedly dualistic from beginning to end at the beginning, libido versus ego or
self-preservative instincts, and at the end Eros versus Thanatos, life against
death. Freud’s instinct theory not to be confused with standard biological
notions of hereditary behavior patterns in animals places instincts on the
borderland between the mental and physical and insists that they are internally
complex. In particular, the sexual instinct must be understood as made up of
components that vary along a number of dimensions source, aim, and object.
Otherwise, as Freud argues in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 5, it
would be difficult to understand how the various perversions are recognized as
“sexual” despite their distance from the “normal” conception of sexuality
heterosexual genital intercourse between adults. His broadened concept of
sexuality makes intelligible sexual preferences emphasizing different sources
erotogenic zones or bodily centers of arousal, aims acts, such as intercourse
and looking, designed to achieve pleasure and satisfaction, and objects whether
of the same or different gender, or even other than whole living persons. It
also allows for the recognition of infantile sexuality. Phenomena that might
not on the surface appear sexual e.g. childhood thumbsucking share essential
characteristics with obviously sexual activity infantile sensual sucking
involves pleasurable stimulation of the same erotogenic zone, the mouth,
stimulated in adult sexual activities such as kissing, and can be understood as
earlier stages in the development of the same underlying instinct that
expresses itself in such various forms in adult sexuality. The standard
developmental stages are oral, anal, phallic, and genital. Neuroses, which
Freud saw as “the negative of perversions” i.e., the same desires that might in
some lead to perverse activity, when repressed, result in neurosis, could often
be traced to struggles with the Oedipus complex: the “nucleus of the neuroses.”
The Oedipus complex, which in its positive form postulates sexual feelings
toward the parent of the opposite sex and ambivalently hostile feelings toward
the parent of the same sex, suggests that the universal shape of the human
condition is a triangle. The conflict reaches its peak between the ages of
three and five, during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. The
fundamental structuring of emotions has its roots in the prolonged dependency
of the human infant, leading to attachment
a primary form of love to the
primary caregiver, who partly for biological reasons such as lactation is most
often the mother, and the experience of others as rivals for the time,
attention, and concern of the primary caregiver. Freud’s views of the Oedipus
complex should not be oversimplified. The sexual desires involved, e.g., are
typically unconscious and necessarily infantile, and infantile sexuality and
its associated desires are not expressed in the same form as mature genital
sexuality. His efforts to explain the distinctive features of female
psychosexual development in particular led to some of his most controversial
views, including the postulation of penis envy to explain why girls but not
boys standardly experience a shift in gender of their primary love object both
starting with the mother as the object. Later love objects, including
psychoanalysts as the objects of transference feelings in the analytic setting,
the analyst functions as a blank screen onto which the patient projects
feelings, are the results of displacement or transference from earlier objects:
“The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.” Freud used the same
structure of explanation for symptoms and for more normal phenomena, such as
dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue. All can be seen as compromise
formations between forces pressing for expression localized by Freud’s
structural theory in the id, understood as a reservoir of unconscious instinct
and forces of repression some also unconscious, seeking to meet the constraints
of morality and reality. On Freud’s underlying model, the fundamental process
of psychic functioning, the primary process, leads to the uninhibited discharge
of psychic energy. Such discharge is experienced as pleasurable, hence the
governing principle of the fundamental process is called the pleasure
principle. Increase of tension is experienced as unpleasure, and the psychic
apparatus aims at a state of equilibrium or constancy sometimes Freud writes as
if the state aimed at is one of zero tension, hence the Nirvana principle
associated with the death instinct in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle
[0]. But since pleasure can in fact only be achieved under specific conditions,
which sometimes require arrangement, planning, and delay, individuals must
learn to inhibit discharge, and this secondary process thinking is governed by
what Freud came to call the reality principle. The aim is still satisfaction,
but the “exigencies of life” require attention, reasoning, and judgment to
avoid falling into the fantasy wishfulfillment of the primary process.
Sometimes defense mechanisms designed to avoid increased tension or unpleasure
can fail, leading to neurosis in general, under the theory, a neurosis is a
psychological disorder rooted in unconscious conflict particular neuroses being correlated with
particular phases of development and particular mechanisms of defense.
Repression, involving the confining of psychic representations to the unconscious,
is the most important of the defense mechanisms. It should be understood that
unlike preconscious ideas, which are merely descriptively unconscious though
one may not be aware of them at the moment, they are readily accessible to
consciousness, unconscious ideas in the strict sense are kept from awareness by
forces of repression, they are dynamically unconscious as evidenced by the resistance to making the
unconscious conscious in therapy. Freud’s deep division of the mind between
unconscious and conscious goes beyond neurotic symptoms to help make sense of
familiar forms of irrationality such as selfdeception, ambivalence, and
weakness of the will that are highly problematical on Cartesian models of an
indivisible unitary consciousness. Perhaps the best example of the primary
process thinking that characterizes the unconscious unconstrained by the
realities of time, contradiction, causation, etc. can be found in dreaming.
Freud regarded dreams as “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious.”
Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of unconscious wishes. In extracting the
meaning of dreams through a process of interpretation, Freud relied on a
central distinction between the manifest content the dream as dreamt or as
remembered on waking and the latent content the unconscious dreamthoughts.
Freud held that interpretation via association to particular elements of the
manifest content reversed the process of dream construction, the dream-work in
which various mechanisms of distortion operated on the day’s residues
perceptions and thoughts stemming from the day before the dream was dreamt and
the latent dream-thoughts to produce the manifest dream. Prominent among the
mechanisms are the condensation in which many meanings are represented by a
single idea and displacement in which there is a shift of affect from a
significant and intense idea to an associated but otherwise insignificant one
also typical of neurotic symptoms, as well as considerations of
representability and secondary revision more specific to dream formation.
Symbolism is less prominent in Freud’s theory of dreams than is often thought;
indeed, the section on symbols appeared only as a later addition to The
Interpretation of Dreams 0. Freud explicitly rejected the ancient “dream book” mode
of interpretation in terms of fixed symbols, and believed one had to recover
the hidden meaning of a dream through the dreamer’s not the interpreter’s
associations to particular elements. Such associations are a part of the
process of free association, in which a patient is obliged to report to the
analyst all thoughts without censorship of any kind. The process is crucial to
psychoanalysis, which is both a technique of psychotherapy and a method of
investigation of the workings of the mind. Freud used the results of his
investigations to speculate about the origins of morality, religion, and
political authority. He tended to find their historical and psychological roots
in early stages of the development of the individual. Morality in particular he
traced to the internalization as one part of the resolution of the Oedpius
complex of parental prohibitions and demands, producing a conscience or
superego which is also the locus of self-observation and the ego-ideal. Such
identification by incorporation introjection plays an important role in character
formation in general. The instinctual renunciation demanded by morality and
often achieved by repression Freud regarded as essential to the order society
needs to conduct its business. Civilization gets the energy for the
achievements of art and science by sublimation of the same instinctual drives.
But the costs of society and civilization to the individual in frustration,
unhappiness, and neurosis can be too high. Freud’s individual therapy was meant
to lead to the liberation of repressed energies which would not by itself
guarantee happiness; he hoped it might also provide energy to transform the
world and moderate its excess demands for restraint. But just as his individual
psychology was founded on the inevitability of internal conflict, in his social
thought he saw some limits especially on aggression the death instinct turned outward as
necessary and he remained pessimistic about the apparently endless struggle
reason must wage Civilization and Its Discontents, 0. Freudscher
Versprecher Zur Navigation springenZur Suche springen Ein Freudscher
Versprecher (nach Sigmund Freud), auch Lapsus Linguae genannt, ist eine
sprachliche Fehlleistung, bei der angeblich ein eigentlicher Gedanke oder eine
Intention des Sprechers unwillkürlich zutage tritt. Inhaltsverzeichnis
1Allgemeine Beschreibung 2 Begründungen der Theorie 3 Akzeptanz und
wissenschaftliche Abgrenzung 4 Beispiele 5 Literatur 6 Weblinks 7 Einzelnachweise
Allgemeine Beschreibung Bei der Bewertung eines scheinbar sinnvollen
Versprechers als einer Freudschen Fehlleistung wird davon ausgegangen, dass in
der Bedeutungsabweichung, die durch einen Versprecher entsteht, eine unbewusste
Aussage zum Vorschein kommt. Es wird also nicht angenommen, dass solchen Versprechern
eine einfache, (neuro-)physiologische oder auch assoziative Beeinflussung der
Sprachproduktion zugrunde liegt,[1][2] sondern behauptet, dass es v. a. eine
psychische Ursache dafür gibt. Bei den Freudschen Fehlleistungen würde somit
anstelle des eigentlich Gemeinten etwas gesagt werden, das dem Gedachten ggf.
sogar besser entspräche und in diesem Sinne interpretiert werden könnte.
Die Existenz eines solchen Phänomens wurde durch Freud (1900, 1904) in Zur
Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens behauptet. Seit dem allgemeinen
Bekanntwerden der auf Freuds Befunde gestützten Theorie der Fehlleistungen hat
jemand, dem ein solcher Versprecher unterläuft, einen schlechten Stand, seinem
Publikum nachzuweisen, dass es sich gar nicht um einen Lapsus der Freudschen
Art handelt, wohingegen vor Freuds Zeit solch ein Versprecher lediglich ein
Anlass zur Heiterkeit gewesen wäre, oder eventuell begleitet von völligem
Unverständnis, auch empörtem Getuschel. Ein Beispiel von Freud sei hier
berichtet:[3] „Ein Mann erzählt von irgendwelchen Vorgängen, die er
beanstandet, und setzt fort: Dann aber sind Tatsachen zum ‚Vorschwein‘
gekommen. ([…] Auf Anfrage bestätigt er, dass er diese Vorgänge als
‚Schweinereien‘ bezeichnen wollte.) ‚Vorschein und Schweinerei‘ haben zusammen
das sonderbare ‚Vorschwein‘ entstehen lassen.“ – Sigmund Freud[4] Diese
Bewertung hatte also nicht verbalisiert werden sollen, hatte sich aber Bahn
verschafft, indem sie sich in die aktuelle Äußerung als (Freudscher)
Versprecher einschob. Aufgrund spezifischer Motivation kann man erst dann,
nämlich bei solchen, einen Nebengedanken unterdrückenden Maßnahmen, von einer
eigentlichen „Fehl“-Leistung sprechen. Begründungen der Theorie Freudsche
Versprecher sind solche, bei denen eine psychische Motivation angenommen wird,
ein „Sinn“, wie es bei Freud heißt, um eine Abgrenzung gegen die Urteile
„Zufall“ oder „physiologischer Hintergrund“ als Ursache solcher (Fehl- oder
richtigen) Leistungen vorzunehmen. An dieser Bestimmung wird zugleich die
Bandbreite des Problemfeldes deutlich: Einerseits handelt es sich um ein
Phänomen. Das heißt: Es ist für den Sprecher mindestens potentiell erkennbar,
dass seinen Zuhörern etwas zu Ohren kam, was so nicht bewusst beabsichtigt
gewesen war; Rosa Ferber hat allerdings festgestellt, dass die meisten
Versprecher gar nicht bemerkt werden, weder von den Sendern noch von den
Empfängern.[5] Andererseits handelt es sich bei Freuds Aussage, es stecke
allgemein ein „Sinn“ hinter allen sog. „Freudschen Fehlleistungen“, um die
wissenschaftliche Interpretation eines Phänomens: Unter der Prämisse, dass der
Versprecher einen unbewussten oder vorbewussten Beweggrund zur Ursache habe –
einen erkennbaren Sinn oder eine Struktur – besteht die erste Aufgabe darin, zu
untersuchen, welcher Beweggrund als der wahrscheinlichste angenommen werden
kann. Akzeptanz und wissenschaftliche Abgrenzung Gegenüber dieser
Vorgehensweise spaltet sich das wissenschaftliche Lager in mindestens drei
Teile auf: Die einen halten die Frage der Motivierung überhaupt für
verfehlt und falsch und wollen nur Untersuchungen zulassen, die sich aus der
Sicht der rein physiologischen Prozesse mit der Sprachproduktion und den deren
Ablauf störenden Versprechern befassen. Für dieses Lager sind Versprecher
wertvolle Fenster, die Einblicke u. a. in die neurologisch gesteuerte
Sprachproduktion gestatten. Michael Motley wäre dagegen ein Vertreter des
anderen Lagers, der in der Psycholinguistik die Motivierung von Versprechern
experimentell nachzuweisen versucht. Motley konnte, indem er bei einem
Schnelllesen-Experiment als Kontext sexuell oder neutral geprägte Situationen
anbot, zeigen, dass die Frequenz der Freud’schen Versprechern bei sexuellen
Kontext-Situationen im Vergleich zu neutralen zunimmt. Damit bestätigte er
experimentell die Freudsche Theorie, und Dilger/Bredenkamp kombinieren beide
Ansätze. Neurolinguistischen Untersuchungen zufolge existieren organisch
bedingte oder zufällig auftretende Störungen des ordentlichen Sprachablaufs.
Grund können beispielsweise Zerstörungen oder Fehlbildungen von Arealen des
Sprachzentrums im Gehirn sein. Daher ist es nicht sinnvoll, hinter jeder Art
von Versprechern eine Freudsche Fehlleistung zu vermuten. Die
Versprecherforschung im Rahmen der kognitiven Linguistik untersucht den Zusammenhang
zwischen sprachlichen Strukturen und auftretenden Versprechertypen. Die hierbei
gefundenen Erklärungen für unterschiedliche Arten von Versprechern machen in
vielen Fällen die Annahme einer psychischen Ursache im Sinne der Freudschen
Theorien überflüssig (siehe Linguistische Versprecher-Theorien).
Insbesondere aber ist die Frage der Motivierung bei lexikalischen Versprechern
nicht unangebracht. Je nachdem, welche Auffassung man von den psychischen
Vorgängen und der „Topologie des psychischen Apparates“ hat, wird man dem
Unbewussten mehr oder weniger Wirkungskraft zuschreiben. Beispiele Freud
führt in der Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens an: Der deutschnationale
Abgeordnete Lattmann tritt 1908 im Reichstag für eine Ergebenheitsadresse an
Wilhelm II. ein, und wenn man das tue, „[…] so wollen wir das auch rückgratlos
tun.“ Nach, laut Sitzungsprotokoll, minutenlanger stürmischer Heiterkeit
erklärt der Redner, er habe natürlich rückhaltlos gemeint. Otto Rank führt im
Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse eine Stelle aus Shakespeares Der Kaufmann von
Venedig an: Porzia ist es eigentlich durch ein Gelübde verboten, Bassanio ihre
Liebe zu gestehen, sagt aber „Halb bin ich Euer, die andre Hälfte Euer – mein
wollt ich sagen.“ Literatur Sven Staffeldt: Das Drängen der störenden
Redeabsicht. Dieter Fladers Kritik an Freuds Theorie der Versprecher, Kümmerle,
Göppingen 2004. Sebastiano Timpanaro: Il lapsus freudiano: Psicanalisi e
critica testuale (Florenz: La Nuova Italia 1974). Englische Übersetzung: The
Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism. Transl. by Kate Soper
(London, 1976). Weblinks Sabine Stahl: "Wolker bis heitig" und andere
Versprecher, SWR2 – „Wissen“ vom 3. April 2009 Einzelnachweise Nora
Wiedenmann (1998): Versprecher. Phänomene und Daten. Mit Materialien auf
Diskette. Wien: Wissenschaftsverlag Edition Praesens. Nora Wiedenmann
(1997): Versprecher – Dissimilation und Similation von Konsonanten.
Sprachproduktion unter spatio-temporalem Aspekt. Dissertation.
Sprechwissenschaft und Psycholinguistik, Institut für Phonetik und Sprachliche
Kommunikation; Philosophische Fakultät für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft
II; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; = 1999: Versprecher: Dissimilation
von Konsonanten. Sprachproduktion unter spatio-temporalem Aspekt (Linguistische
Arbeiten, 404). Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hartmann Hinterhuber: Sigmund Freud,
Rudolf Meringer und Carl Mayer: Versprechen und Verlesen. In: Neuropsychiatrie.
Band 21, Nr. 4, 2007, S. 291–296. Sigmund Freud: Gesammelte Werke. Band
XI, 1916/1917, S. 35. R. Ferber: Fehlerlinguistik. Eine
Sprechfehlersammlung und ihre beschreibende Darstellung. In: Unpublished MA
thesis, University of Freiburg. 1986. Kategorien: PsychoanalyseMündliche
KommunikationSigmund Freud als NamensgeberFehlleistung. The Signorelli
parapraxis represents the first and best known example of a parapraxis and its
analysis in Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The parapraxis
centers on a word-finding problem and the production of substitutes. Freud
could not recall the name (Signorelli) of the painter of the Orvieto frescos
and produced as substitutes the names of two painters Botticelli and
Boltraffio. Freud's analysis shows what associative processes had linked
Signorelli to Botticelli and Boltraffio. The analysis has been criticised by
linguists and others. Contents 1 Botticelli – Boltraffio – Trafoi 2 Trafoi in Kraepelin's dream 3 Sebastiano
Timpanaro 4 Swales' investigation 5 Freud neglected his own observation 6 See
also 7 References 8 Sources 9 Further reading Botticelli – Boltraffio – Trafoi
One important ingredient in Freud's analysis was the North-Italian village
Trafoi where he received the message of the suicide of one of his patients,
struggling with sexual problems. Without Trafoi the substitute Boltraffio associated
to it would be incomprehensible. Freud links Trafoi to the theme death and
sexuality, a theme preceding the word finding problem in a conversation Freud
had during a trip by train through Bosnia-Herzegovina. The second
important ingredient in Freud's analysis is the extraction of an Italian word
signor from the forgotten name Signorelli. Herr, the German counterpart of
Signor, is then linked to (Her)zegovina and the word Herr occurring, as Freud
tells us, in the conversation. That country's Turks, he recalled, valued sexual
pleasure a lot, and he was told by a colleague that a patient once said to him:
"For you know, sir (Herr) if that ceases, life no longer has any
charm". Moreover, Freud argued that (Bo)snia linked (Bo)tticelli with (Bo)ltraffio
and Trafoi. He concludes by saying: "We shall represent this state of
affairs carefully enough if we assert that beside the simple forgetting of
proper names there is another forgetting which is motivated by
repression".[1] Freud denies the relevance of the content of the
frescos. Nevertheless, psychoanalysts have pursued their investigations
particularly into this direction, finding however no new explanation of the
parapraxis. Jacques Lacan suggested that the parapraxis may be an act of
self-forgetting. Trafoi in Kraepelin's dream The first critique to Freud
came from Emil Kraepelin, who in a postscript to his 1906 monograph on language
disturbances in dreams, relates a dream involving Trafoi. The dream centers
around a neologism Trafei, which Kraepelin links to Trafoi. The dream may be
seen as an implicit critique on Freud's analysis. Italian trofei is associated
to Trafei in the same way as Trafoi (cf. van Ooijen, 1996) and clarifies
Kraepelin's dream. The meaning of trofei reads in German Siegeszeichen
(victory-signs) and this German word together with Latin signum clearly links
to Freud's first name (Engels, 2006, p. 22-24). Sebastiano Timpanaro In
The Freudian Slip Sebastiano Timpanaro discusses Freud's analysis in chapter 6
"Love and Death at Orvieto." (p. 63-81). He in fact doubts that the
name Boltraffio would have played a major role during the parapraxis, as he
states: "Boltraffio is a Schlimbesserung [that is a substitute worse than
another substitute]" and adds "the correction goes astray because of
incapacity to localize the fault."(p. 71). He calls Botticelli an
"involuntary banalization" and Boltraffio "a semi-conscious
disimproved correction."(p. 75). As to the Signor-element in Freud's
analysis he puts: "The immediate equivalence Signore= Herr is one thing,
the extraction of signor from Signorelli and of Her(r) from Herzegowina is
another." Swales' investigation Peter Swales (2003) investigated the
historical data and states that Freud probably visited an exposition of Italian
masters in Bergamo mid-September 1898, showing paintings of Signorelli,
Botticelli and Boltraffio one next to the other. In his view the paintings at
the exposition were the source of the substitute names in the parapraxis.
Swales dwells largely on the three paintings. The association of the name
Boltraffio to the name Da Vinci, another hypothesis formulated by Swales
(because Freud might have seen the statue of Boltraffio at the bottom of the Da
Vinci monument on Piazza della Scala in Milan some days before his visit to
Bergamo), is not further pursued by Swales. Although Freud visited Trafoi on
the 8th of August 1898, Swales doubts whether Freud received a message on the
suicide of one of his patients. Freud neglected his own observation
Fresco of the Deeds of the Antichrist Freud in his analysis did not use the
fact that he remembered very well a picture of the painter in the lower left
corner of one of the frescos. The picture, sort of a signature, was thus a
third substitute to the forgotten name Signorelli. The "signature"
can be interpreted as a reference to the Latin verb signare and this word,
instead of Freud's signore, then leads to a simple analysis of the Signorelli
parapraxis (Engels, 2006, p. 66-69). There seems to be no more need for the
Bosnia-Herzegovina associations (Bo and Herr) Freud himself introduced. In the
alternative to Freud's analysis the suicide message in Trafoi remains an
important point to understand the parapraxis (this message being a blow to
Freud's self-esteem). The occurrence of the Signorelli parapraxis during
Freud's trip from Ragusa to Trebinje (in Herzegovina) is not questioned, as was
done by Swales.[citation needed] See also Dream speech References
Freud, S. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, chapter 1, "Forgetting of
Proper Names". Sources Engels, Huub (2006). Emil Kraepelins Traumsprache
1908-1926. ISBN 978-90-6464-060-5 Timpanaro, S. (1976). The Freudian Slip:
Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism. London: NLB. Swales, P. (2003). Freud,
Death and Sexual Pleasures. On the Psychical Mechanism of Dr. Sigm. Freud. Arc
de Cercle, 1, 4-74. Further reading Molnar, M. (1994). Reading the Look. In
Sander, Gilman, Birmele, Geller & Greenberg (ed.): Reading Freud's Reading.
pp. 77–90. New York: Oxford. Ooijen, B. van. (1996). Vowel mutability and
lexical selection in English: Evidence from a word reconstruction task. Memory
& Cognition, 24, 573-583. Ooijen shows that in word reconstruction tasks
e.g. the non-word kebra is more readily substituted by cobra than by zebra.
This is what is meant by 'vowel mutability.' Owens, M.E. (2004). Forgetting
Signorelli: Monstruous Visions of the Resurrection of the Dead. Muse: scholarly
journals online. Categories: Psychoanalytic terminologyFreudian psychology. Refs.: H. P. Grice and D. F. Pears, “Motivated
irrationality.”
Functionalism: -- Grice: “With
a capital ‘F,’ of course – one of my
twelve labours!” -- Grice’s functionalism: a response to the dualist challenge
-- dualism, the view that reality consists of two disparate parts. The crux of
dualism is an apparently unbridgeable gap between two incommensurable orders of
being that must be reconciled if our assumption that there is a comprehensible
universe is to be justified. Dualism is exhibited in the pre-Socratic division
between appearance and reality; Plato’s realm of being containing eternal Ideas
and realm of becoming containing changing things; the medieval division between
finite man and infinite God; Descartes’s substance dualism of thinking mind and
extended matter; Hume’s separation of fact from value; Kant’s division between
empirical phenomena and transcendental noumena; the epistemological
double-aspect theory of James and Russell, who postulate a neutral substance
that can be understood in separate ways either as mind or brain; and Heidegger’s
separation of being and time that inspired Sartre’s contrast of being and
nothingness. The doctrine of two truths, the sacred and the profane or the
religious and the secular, is a dualistic response to the conflict between
religion and science. Descartes’s dualism is taken to be the source of the
mindbody problem. If the mind is active unextended thinking and the body is
passive unthinking extension, how can these essentially unlike and
independently existing substances interact causally, and how can mental ideas
represent material things? How, in other words, can the mind know and influence
the body, and how can the body affect the mind? Descartes said mind and body
interact and that ideas represent material things without resembling them, but
dream argument dualism 244 244 could
not explain how, and concluded merely that God makes these things happen.
Proposed dualist solutions to the mindbody problem are Malebranche’s
occasionalism mind and body do not interact but God makes them appear to; Leibniz’s
preestablished harmony among noninteracting monads; and Spinoza’s property
dualism of mutually exclusive but parallel attributes expressing the one
substance God. Recent mindbody dualists are Popper and John C. Eccles. Monistic
alternatives to dualism include Hobbes’s view that the mental is merely the
epiphenomena of the material; Berkeley’s view that material things are
collections of mental ideas; and the contemporary materialist view of Smart,
Armstrong, and Paul and Patricia Churchland that the mind is the brain. A
classic treatment of these matters is Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Revolt Against
Dualism. Dualism is related to binary thinking, i.e., to systems of thought
that are two-valued, such as logic in which theorems are valid or invalid, epistemology
in which knowledge claims are true or false, and ethics in which individuals
are good or bad and their actions are right or wrong. In The Quest for
Certainty, Dewey finds that all modern problems of philosophy derive from
dualistic oppositions, particularly between spirit and nature. Like Hegel, he
proposes a synthesis of oppositions seen as theses versus antitheses. Recent
attacks on the view that dualistic divisions can be explicitly described or
maintained have been made by Vitters, who offers instead a classification
scheme based on overlapping family resemblances; by Quine, who casts doubt on
the division between analytic or formal truths based on meanings and synthetic
or empirical truths based on facts; and by Derrida, who challenges our ability
to distinguish between the subjective and the objective. But despite the
extremely difficult problems posed by ontological dualism, and despite the
cogency of many arguments against dualistic thinking, Western philosophy
continues to be predominantly dualistic, as witnessed by the indispensable use
of two-valued matrixes in logic and ethics and by the intractable problem of
rendering mental intentions in terms of material mechanisms or vice versa. functional dependence, a relationship between
variable magnitudes especially physical magnitudes and certain properties or
processes. In modern physical science there are two types of laws stating such
relationships. 1 There are numerical laws stating concomitant variation of
certain quantities, where a variation in any one is accompanied by variations
in the others. An example is the law for ideal gases: pV % aT, where p is the
pressure of the gas, V its volume, T its absolute temperature, and a a constant
derived from the mass and the nature of the gas. Such laws say nothing about
the temporal order of the variations, and tests of the laws can involve
variation of any of the relevant magnitudes. Concomitant variation, not causal
sequence, is what is tested for. 2 Other numerical laws state variations of
physical magnitudes correlated with times. Galileo’s law of free fall asserts
that the change in the unit time of a freely falling body in a vacuum in the
direction of the earth is equal to gt, where g is a constant and t is the time
of the fall, and where the rate of time changes of g is correlative with the
temporal interval t. The law is true of any body in a state of free fall and
for any duration. Such laws are also called “dynamical” because they refer to
temporal processes usually explained by the postulation of forces acting on the
objects in question. functionalism, the view that mental states are defined by
their causes and effects. As a metaphysical thesis about the nature of mental
states, functionalism holds that what makes an inner state mental is not an
intrinsic property of the state, but rather its relations to sensory
stimulation input, to other inner states, and to behavior output. For example,
what makes an inner state a pain is its being a type of state typically caused
by pinpricks, sunburns, and so on, a type that causes other mental states e.g.,
worry, and a type that causes behavior e.g., saying “ouch”. Propositional
attitudes also are identified with functional states: an inner state is a
desire for water partly in virtue of its causing a person to pick up a glass
and drink its contents when the person believes that the glass contains water.
The basic distinction needed for functionalism is that between role in terms of
which a type of mental state is defined and occupant the particular thing that
occupies a role. Functional states exhibit multiple realizability: in different
kinds of beings humans, computers, Martians, a particular kind of causal role
may have different occupants e.g., the
causal role definitive of a belief that p, say, may be occupied by a neural
state in a human, but occupied perhaps by a hydraulic state in a Martian.
Functionalism, like behaviorism, thus entails that mental states may be shared
by physically dissimilar systems. Although functionalism does not automatically
rule out the existence of immaterial souls, its motivation has been to provide
a materialistic account of mentality. The advent of the computer gave impetus
to functionalism. First, the distinction between software and hardware
suggested the distinction between role function and occupant structure. Second,
since computers are automated, they demonstrate how inner states can be causes
of output in the absence of a homunculus i.e., a “little person” intelligently
directing output. Third, the Turing machine provided a model for one of the
earliest versions of functionalism. A Turing machine is defined by a table that
specifies transitions from current state and input to next state or to output.
According to Turing machine functionalism, any being with pscychological states
has a unique best description, and each psychological state is identical to a
machine table state relative to that description. To be in mental state type M
is to instantiate or realize Turing machine T in state S. Turing machine
functionalism, developed largely by Putnam, has been criticized by Putnam, Ned
Block, and Fodor. To cite just one serious problem: two machine table
states and hence, according to Turing
machine functionalism, two psychological states
are distinct if they are followed by different states or by different
outputs. So, if a pinprick causes A to say “Ouch” and causes B to say “Oh,”
then, if Turing machine functionalism were true, A’s and B’s states of pain
would be different psychological states. But we do not individuate
psychological states so finely, nor should we: such fine-grained individuation
would be unsuitable for psychology. Moreover, if we assume that there is a path
from any state to any other state, Turing machine functionalism has the
unacceptable consequence that no two systems have any of their states in common
unless they have all their states in common. Perhaps the most prominent version
of functionalism is the causal theory of mind. Whereas Turing machine
functionalism is based on a technical computational or psychological theory,
the causal theory of mind relies on commonsense understanding: according to the
causal theory of mind, the concept of a mental state is the concept of a state
apt for bringing about certain kinds of behavior Armstrong. Mental state terms
are defined by the commonsense platitudes in which they appear David Lewis.
Philosophers can determine a priori what mental states are by conceptual
analysis or by definition. Then scientists determine what physical states
occupy the causal roles definitive of mental states. If it turned out that
there was no physical state that occupied the causal role of, say, pain i.e.,
was caused by pinpricks, etc., and caused worry, etc., it would follow, on the
causal theory, that pain does not exist. To be in mental state type M is to be
in a physical state N that occupies causal role R. A third version is
teleological or “homuncular” functionalism, associated with William G. Lycan
and early Dennett. According to homuncular functionalism, a human being is analogous
to a large corporation, made up of cooperating departments, each with its own
job to perform; these departments interpret stimuli and produce behavioral
responses. Each department at the highest subpersonal level is in turn
constituted by further units at a sub-subpersonal level and so on down until
the neurological level is reached. The roleoccupant distinction is thus
relativized to level: an occupant at one level is a role at the next level
down. On this view, to be in a mental state type M is to have a sub- . . .
subpersonal f-er that is in its characteristic state Sf. All versions of
functionalism face problems about the qualitative nature of mental states. The
difficulty is that functionalism individuates states in purely relational
terms, but the acrid odor of, say, a paper mill seems to have a non-relational,
qualitative character that functionalism misses altogether. If two people, on
seeing a ripe banana, are in states with the same causes and effects, then, by
functionalist definition, they are in the same mental state say, having a sensation of yellow. But it
seems possible that one has an “inverted spectrum” relative to the other, and
hence that their states are qualitatively different. Imagine that, on seeing
the banana, one of the two is in a state qualitatively indistinguishable from
the state that the other would be in on seeing a ripe tomato. Despite
widespread intuitions that such inverted spectra are possible, according to
functionalism, they are not. A related problem is that of “absent qualia.” The
population of China, or even the economy of Bolivia, could be functionally
equivalent to a human brain i.e., there
could be a function that mapped the relations between inputs, outputs, and
internal states of the population of China onto those of a human brain; yet the
population of China, no matter how its members interact with one another and
with other nations, intuitively does not have mental states. The status of
these arguments remains controversial.
fundamentum
divisionis:
a term in Scholastic logic and ontology for the ‘grounds for a distinction’.
Some distinctions categorize separately existing things, such as men and
beasts. This is a real distinction, and the fundamentum divisionis exists in
reality. Some distinctions categorize things that cannot exist separately but
can be distinguished mentally, such as the difference between being a human
being and having a sense of humor, or the difference between a soul and one of
its powers, say, the power of thinking. A mental distinction is also called a
formal distinction. Duns Scotus is well known for the idea of formalis
distinctio cum fundamento ex parte rei a formal distinction with a foundation
in the thing, primarily in order to handle logical problems with functionalism,
analytical fundamentum divisionis 335
335 the Christian concept of God. God is supposed to be absolutely
simple; i.e., there can be no multiplicity of composition in him. Yet,
according to traditional theology, many properties can be truly attributed to
him. He is wise, good, and powerful. In order to preserve the simplicity of
God, Duns Scotus claimed that the difference between wisdom, goodness, and
power was only formal but still had some foundation in God’s own being. Refs.:
H. P. Grice, “The fundamentum divisionis of all my divisions!”
futurum
contingens:
Grice knew that his obsession with action was an obsession with the uncertainty
of a contingent future, alla Aristotle. Futurum -- future contingents, singular
events or states of affairs that may come to pass, and also may not come to
pass, in the future. There are three traditional problems involving future
contingents: the question of universal validity of the principle of bivalence,
the question of free will and determinism, and the question of foreknowledge.
The debate about future contingents in modern philosophical logic was revived
by Lukasiewicz’s work on three-valued logic. He thought that in order to avoid
fatalistic consequences, we must admit that the principle of bivalence for any
proposition, p, either p is true or not-p is true does not hold good for
propositions about future contingents. Many authors have considered this view
confused. According to von Wright, e.g., when propositions are said to be true
or false and ‘is’ in ‘it is true that’ is tenseless or atemporal, the illusion
of determinism does not arise. It has its roots in a tacit oscillation between
a temporal and an atemporal reading of the phrase ‘it is true’. In a
temporalized reading, or in its tensed variants such as ‘it was/will be/is
already true’, one can substitute, for ‘true’, other words like ‘certain’,
‘fixed’, or ‘necessary’. Applying this diachronic necessity to atemporal
predications of truth yields the idea of logical determinism. In contemporary
discussions of tense and modality, future contingents are often treated with
the help of a model of time as a line that breaks up into branches as it moves
from left to right i.e., from past to future. Although the conception of truth
at a moment has been found philosophically problematic, the model of historical
modalities and branching time as such is much used in works on freedom and
determination. Aristotle’s On Interpretation IX contains a classic discussion
of future contingents with the famous example of tomorrow’s sea battle. Because
of various ambiguities in the text and in Aristotle’s modal conceptions in
general, the meaning of the passage is in dispute. In the Metaphysics VI.3 and
in the Niocmachean Ethics III.5, Aristotle tries to show that not all things
are predetermined. The Stoics represented a causally deterministic worldview;
an ancient example of logical determinism is Diodorus Cronus’s famous master
argument against contingency. Boethius thought that Aristotle’s view can be
formulated as follows: the principle of bivalence is universally valid, but
propositions about future contingents, unlike those about past and present
things, do not obey the stronger principle according to which each proposition
is either determinately true or determinately false. A proposition is
indeterminately true as long as the conditions that make it true are not yet
fixed. This was the standard Latin doctrine from Abelard to Aquinas. Similar
discussions occurred in Arabic commentaries on On Interpretation. In the
fourteenth century, many thinkers held that Aristotle abandoned bivalence for
future contingent propositions. This restriction was usually refuted, but it
found some adherents like Peter Aureoli. Duns Scotus and Ockham heavily
criticized the Boethian-Thomistic view that God can know future contingents
only because the flux of time is present to divine eternity. According to them,
God contingently foreknows free acts. Explaining this proved to be a very
cumbersome task. Luis de Molina 15351600 suggested that God knows what possible
creatures would do in any possible situation. This “middle knowledge” theory
about counterfactuals of freedom has remained a living theme in philosophy of
religion; analogous questions are treated in theories of subjunctive reasoning.
futurum
indicativum:
The Grecians called it just ‘horistike klesis.’ The Romans transliterated as
modus definitivus, inclination anima affectations demonstrans.’ But they had
other terms, indicativus, finitus, finitivus, and pronuntiativus. f. H. P.
Grice and D. F. Pears, “Predicting and deciding.” The future is essentially
involved in “E communicates that p,” i. e. E, the emissor, intends that his
addressee, in a time later than t, will come to believe this or that. Grice is especially concerned with the future
for his analysis of the communicatum. “Close the door!” By uttering “Close the
door!,” U means that A is to close the door – in the future. So Grice spends
HOURS exploring how one can have justification to have an intention about a
future event. Grice is aware of the ‘shall.’ Grice uses ‘shall’ in the first
person to mean wha the calls ‘futurum indicativum.’ (He considers the case of
the ‘shall’ in the second and third persons in his analysis of mode). What are
the conditions for the use of “shall” in the first person. “I shall close the
door” may be predictable. It is in the indicative mode. “Thou shalt close the
door,” and “He shall close the door” are in the imperative mode, or rather they
correspond to the ‘futurum intentionale.’
Since Grice is an analytic philosopher,
he specifies the analysis in the third person (“U means that…”) one has to be
careful. For ‘futurum indicativum’ we have ‘shall’ in the first person, and
‘will’ in the second and third persons. So for the first group, U means that he
will go. In the second group, U means that his addressee or a third party shall
go. Grice adopts a subscript variant, stick with ‘will,’ but add the mode
afterwards: so will-ind. will be ‘futurum indicativum,’ and will-int. will be
futurum intentionale. The OED has it as “shall,” and defines as a Germanic
preterite-present strong verb. In Old English, it is “sceal,” and which the OED
renders as “to owe (money,” 1425 Hoccleve Min. Poems, The leeste ferthyng þat y
men shal. To owe (allegiance); 1649 And by that feyth I shal to god and yow;
followed by an infinitive, without to. Except for a few instances of shall
will, shall may (mowe), "shall conne" in the 15th c., the infinitive
after shall is always either that of a principal verb or of have or be; The present
tense shall; in general statements of what is right or becoming, = ought,
superseded by the past subjunctive should; in OE. the subjunctive present
sometimes occurs in this use; 1460 Fortescue Abs. and Lim. Mon. The king shall
often times send his judges to punish rioters and risers. 1562 Legh Armory;
Whether are Roundells of all suche coloures, as ye haue spoken of here before?
or shall they be Namesd Roundelles of those coloures? In OE. and occas. in
Middle English used to express necessity of various kinds. For the many shades
of meaning in Old English see Bosworth and Toller), = must, "must
needs", "have to", "am compelled to", etc.; in stating
a necessary condition: = `will have to, `must (if something else is to happen).
1596 Shaks. Merch. V. i. i. 116 You shall seeke all day ere you finde them,
& when you haue them they are not worth the search. 1605 Shaks. Lear.
He that parts vs, shall bring a Brand from Heauen. c In hypothetical clause,
accompanying the statement of a necessary condition: = `is to. 1612 Bacon Ess.,
Greatn. Kingd., Neither must they be too much broken of it, if they shall be
preserued in vigor; ndicating what is appointed or settled to take place = the
mod. `is to, `am to, etc. 1600 Shaks. A.Y.L. What is he that shall buy his
flocke and pasture? 1625 in Ellis Orig. Lett. Ser. "Tomorrow His Majesty
will be present to begin the Parliament
which is thought shall be removed to Oxford; in commands or instructions; n the
second person, “shall” is equivalent to an imperative. Chiefly in Biblical
language, of divine commandments, rendering the jussive future of the Hebrew
and Vulgate. In Old English the imperative mode is used in the ten
commandments. 1382 Wyclif Exod. Thow shalt not tak the Names of the Lord thi
God in veyn. So Coverdale, etc. b) In expositions: you shall understand, etc.
(that). c) In the formula you shall excuse (pardon) me. (now "must").
1595 Shaks. John. Your Grace shall pardon me, I will not backe. 1630 R.
Johnsons Kingd. and Commw. 191 You shall excuse me, for I eat no flesh on
Fridayes; n the *third* person. 1744 in Atkyns Chanc. Cases (1782) III. 166 The
words shall and may in general acts of parliament, or in private constitutions,
are to be construed imperatively, they must remove them; in the second and
third persons, expressing the determination by the Griceian utterer to bring
about some action, event, or state of things in the future, or (occasionally)
to refrain from hindering what is otherwise certain to take place, or is
intended by another person; n the second person. 1891 J. S. Winter Lumley. If
you would rather not stay then, you shall go down to South Kensington Square
then; in third person. 1591 Shaks. Two Gent. Verona shall not hold thee. 1604
Shaks. Oth. If there be any cunning Crueltie, That can torment him much, It
shall be his. 1891 J. S. Winter Lumley xiv, `Oh, yes, sir, she shall come back,
said the nurse. `Ill take care of that. `I will come back, said Vere; in
special interrogative uses, a) in the *first* person, used in questions to
which the expected answer is a command, direction, or counsel, or a resolve on
the speakers own part. a) in questions introduced by an interrogative pronoun
(in oblique case), adverb, or adverbial phrase. 1600 Fairfax Tasso. What shall
we doe? shall we be gouernd still, By this false hand? 1865 Kingsley Herew.
Where shall we stow the mare? b) in categorical questions, often expressing
indignant reprobation of a suggested course of action, the implication (or implicaturum,
or entailment) being that only a negative (or, with negative question an
affirmative) answer is conceivable. 1611 Shaks. Wint. T. Shall I draw the
Curtaine? 1802 Wordsw. To the Cuckoo i, O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird, Or
but a wandering Voice? 1891 J. S. Winter Lumley `Are you driving, or shall I
call you a cab? `Oh, no; Im driving, thanks. c) In *ironical* affirmative in
exclamatory sentence, equivalent to the above interrogative use, cf. Ger. soll.
1741 Richardson Pamela, A pretty thing truly! Here I, a poor helpless Girl,
raised from Poverty and Distress, shall put on Lady-airs to a Gentlewoman born.
d) to stand shall I, shall I (later shill I, shall I: v. shilly-shally), to be
at shall I, shall I (not): to be vacillating, to shilly-shally. 1674 R. Godfrey
Inj. and Ab. Physic Such Medicines. that will not stand shall I? shall I? but
will fall to work on the Disease presently. b Similarly in the *third* person,
where the Subjects represents or includes the utterer, or when the utterer is
placing himself at anothers point of view. 1610 Shaks. Temp., Hast thou (which
art but aire) a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not my selfe,
One of their kinde be kindlier moud then thou art? In the second and third
person, where the expected answer is a decision on the part of the utterer or
of some person OTHER than the Subjects. The question often serves as an
impassioned repudiation of a suggestion (or implicaturum) that something shall
be permitted. 1450 Merlin `What shal be his Names? `I will, quod she, `that it
haue Names after my fader. 1600 Shaks. A.Y.L.; What shall he haue that kild the
Deare? 1737 Alexander Pope, translating Horaces Epistle, And say, to which
shall our applause belong, this new court jargon, or the good old song? 1812
Crabbe Tales, Shall a wife complain? In indirect question. 1865 Kingsley Herew,
Let her say what shall be done with it; as a mere auxiliary, forming, with
present infinitive, the future, and (with perfect infinitive) the future
perfect tense. In Old English, the notion of the future tense is ordinarily
expressed by the present tense. To prevent ambiguity, wile (will) is not
unfrequently used as a future auxiliary, sometimes retaining no trace of its
initial usage, connected with the faculty of volition, and cognate indeed with
volition. On the other hand, sceal (shall), even when rendering a Latin future,
can hardly be said to have been ever a mere future tense-sign in Old English.
It always expressed something of its original notion of obligation or
necessity, so Hampshire is wrong in saying I shall climb Mt. Everest is predictable.
In Middle English, the present early ceases to be commonly employed in futural
usage, and the future is expressed by shall or will, the former being much
more common. The usage as to the choice between the two auxiliaries, shall and
will, has varied from time to time. Since the middle of the seventeenth
century, with Wallis, mere predictable futurity is expressed in the *first*
person by shall, in the second and third by will, and vice versa. In oratio
obliqua, usage allows either the retention of the auxiliary actually used by
the original utterer, or the substitution of that which is appropriate to the
point of view of the uttering reporting; in Old English, ‘sceal,; while
retaining its primary usage, serves as a tense-sign in announcing a future
event as fated or divinely decreed, cf. Those spots mean measle. Hence shall
has always been the auxiliary used, in all persons, for prophetic or oracular
announcements of the future, and for solemn assertions of the certainty of a
future event. 1577 in Allen Martyrdom Campion; The queene neither ever was, nor
is, nor ever shall be the head of the Church of England. 1601 Shaks. Jul. C.
Now do I Prophesie. A Curse shall light vpon the limbes of men. b In the first
person, "shall" has, from the early ME. period, been the normal
auxiliary for expressing mere futurity, without any adventitious notion. (a) Of
events conceived as independent of the volition of the utterer. To use will in
these cases is now a mark of, not public-school-educated Oxonian, but Scottish,
Irish, provincial, or extra-British idiom. 1595 in Cath. Rec. Soc. Publ. V. 357
My frend, yow and I shall play no more at Tables now. 1605 Shaks. Macb. When
shall we three meet againe? 1613 Shaks. Hen. VIII, Then wee shall haue em,
Talke vs to silence. 1852 Mrs. Stowe Uncle Toms C.; `But what if you dont hit?
`I shall hit, said George coolly; of voluntary action or its intended result.
Here I shall or we shall is always admissible except where the notion of a
present, as distinguished from a previous, decision or consent is to be
expressed, in which case ‘will’ shall be used. Further, I shall often expresses
a determination insisted on in spite of opposition. In the 16th c. and earlier,
I shall often occurs where I will would now be used. 1559 W. Cunningham
Cosmogr. Glasse, This now shall I alway kepe surely in memorye. 1601 Shaks.
Alls Well; Informe him so tis our will he should.-I shall my liege. 1885 Ruskin
On Old Road, note: Henceforward I shall continue to spell `Ryme without our
wrongly added h. c In the *second* person, shall as a mere future auxiliary
appears never to have been usual, but in categorical questions it is normal,
e.g. Shall you miss your train? I am afraid you will. d In the *third* person,
superseded by will, except when anothers statement or expectation respecting
himself is reported in the third person, e.g. He conveys that he shall not have
time to write. Even in this case will is still not uncommon, but in some
contexts leads to serious ambiguity. It might be therefore preferable, to some,
to use ‘he shall’ as the indirect rendering of ‘I shall.’ 1489 Caxton Sonnes of
Aymon ii. 64 Yf your fader come agayn from the courte, he shall wyll yelde you
to the kynge Charlemayne. 1799 J. Robertson Agric. Perth, The effect of the
statute labour has always been, now is,
and probably shall continue to be, less productive than it might. Down to the
eighteenth century, shall, the auxiliary appropriate to the first person, is
sometimes used when the utterer refers to himself in the third person. Cf. the
formula: `And your petitioner shall ever pray. 1798 Kemble Let. in Pearsons
Catal. Mr. Kemble presents his respectful compliments to the Proprietors of the
`Monthly Mirror, and shall have great pleasure at being at all able to aid
them; in negative, or virtually negative, and interrogative use, shall often =
will be able to. 1600 Shaks. Sonn. lxv: How with this rage shall beautie hold a
plea. g) Used after a hypothetical clause or an imperative sentence in a
statementsof a result to be expected from some action or occurrence. Now (exc.
in the *first* person) usually replaced by will. But shall survives in literary
use. 1851 Dasent Jest and Earnest, Visit Rome and you shall find him [the Pope]
mere carrion. h) In clause expressing the object of a promise, or of an
expectation accompanied by hope or fear, now only where shall is the ordinary
future auxiliary, but down to the nineteenth century shall is often preferred
to will in the second and third persons. 1628 in Ellis Orig. Lett. Ser., He is
confident that the blood of Christ shall wash away his sins. 1654 E. Nicholas
in N. Papers, I hope neither your Cosen Wat. Montagu nor Walsingham shall be permitted to
discourse with the D. of Gloucester; in impersonal phrases,
"it shall be well, needful", etc. (to do so and so). (now
"will"). j) shall be, added to a future date in clauses measuring
time. 1617 Sir T. Wentworth in Fortescue Papers. To which purpose my late Lord
Chancelour gave his direction about the 3. of Decembre shallbe-two-yeares; in
the idiomatic use of the future to denote what ordinarily or occasionally
occurs under specified conditions, shall was formerly the usual auxiliary. In
the *second* and *third* persons, this is now somewhat formal or rhetorical.
Ordinary language substitutes will or may. Often in antithetic statements
coupled by an adversative conjunction or by and with adversative force. a in
the first person. 1712 Steele Spect. In spite of all my Care, I shall every now
and then have a saucy Rascal ride by reconnoitring under my Windows. b) in the *second* person.
1852 Spencer Ess. After knowing him for years, you shall suddenly discover that
your friends nose is slightly awry. c) in the *third* person. 1793 W. Roberts
Looker-On, One man shall approve the same thing that another man shall condemn.
1870 M. Arnold St. Paul and Prot. It may well happen that a man who lives and
thrives under a monarchy shall yet theoretically disapprove the principle of
monarchy. Usage No. 10: in hypothetical, relative, and temporal clauses denoting
a future contingency, the future auxiliary is shall for all persons alike.
Where no ambiguity results, however, the present tense is commonly used for the
future, and the perfect for the future-perfect. The use of shall, when not
required for clearness, is, Grice grants, apt to sound pedantic by non
Oxonians. Formerly sometimes used to express the sense of a present
subjunctive. a) in hypothetical clauses. (shall I = if I shall) 1680 New
Hampsh. Prov. Papers, If any Christian shall speak contempteously of the Holy
Scriptures, such person shall be
punished. b) in relative clauses, where the antecedent denotes an as yet
undetermined person or thing: 1811 Southey Let., The minister who shall first
become a believer in that book will
obtain a higher reputation than ever statesman did before him. 1874 R. Congreve
Ess. We extend our sympathies to the unborn generations which shall follow us
on this earth; in temporal clauses: 1830 Laws of Cricket in Nyren Yng.
Cricketers Tutor, If in striking, or at any other time, while the ball shall be
in play, both his feet be over the popping-crease; in clauses expressing the
purposed result of some action, or the object of a desire, intention, command,
or request, often admitting of being replaced by may. In Old English, and
occasionally as late as the seventeenth century, the present subjunctive was
used exactly as in Latin. a) in final clause usually introduced by that. In
this use modern idiom prefers should (22 a): see quot. 1611 below, and the
appended remarks. 1879 M. Pattison Milton At the age of nine and twenty, Milton
has already determined that this lifework shall be an epic poem; in relative
clause: 1599 Shaks. Hen. V, ii. iv. 40: As Gardeners doe with Ordure hide those
Roots that shall first spring. The choice between should and would follows the
same as shall and will as future auxiliaries, except that should must sometimes
be avoided on account of liability to be misinterpreted as = `ought to. In
present usage, should occurs mainly in the first person. In the other persons
it follows the use of shall. III Elliptical and quasi-elliptical uses. Usage
No. 24: with ellipsis of verb of motion: = `shall go; he use is common in OHG.
and OS., and in later HG., LG., and Du. In the Scandinavian languages it is
also common, and instances occur in MSw.] 1596 Shaks. 1 Hen. IV, That with our
small coniunction we should on. 1598 Shaks. Merry W. If the bottome were as
deepe as hell, I shold down; n questions, what shall = `what shall (it) profit,
`what good shall (I) do. Usage No. 26: with the sense `is due, `is proper, `is
to be given or applied. Cf. G. soll. Usage No. 27: a) with ellipsis of active
infinitive to be supplied from the context. 1892 Mrs. H. Ward David Grieve,
`No, indeed, I havnt got all I want, said Lucy `I never shall, neither; if I
shall. Now dial. 1390 Gower Conf. II. 96: Doun knelende on mi kne I take leve,
and if I schal, I kisse hire. 1390 Gower Conf., II. 96: I wolde kisse hire
eftsones if I scholde. 1871 Earle Philol. Engl. Tongue 203: The familiar proposal
to carry a basket, I will if I shall, that is, I am willing if you will command
me; I will if so required. 1886 W. Somerset Word-bk. Ill warn our Tomll do it
vor ee, nif he shall-i.e. if you wish. c) with generalized ellipsis in
proverbial phrase: needs must that needs shall = `he must whom fate compels.
Usage No. 28: a) with ellipsis of do (not occurring in the context). 1477
Norton Ord. Alch., O King that shall These Workes! b) the place of the inf. is
sometimes supplied by that or so placed at the beginning of the sentence. The
construction may be regarded as an ellipsis of "do". It is distinct
from the use (belonging to 27) in which so has the sense of `thus, `likewise,
or `also. In the latter there is usually inversion, as so shall I. 1888 J. S.
Winter Bootles Childr. iv: I should like to see her now shes grown up. `So you
shall. Usage No. 29: with ellipsis of be or passive inf., or with so in place
of this (where the preceding context has is, was, etc.). 1615 J. Chamberlain in
Crt. And Times Jas.; He is not yet executed, nor I hear not when he shall.
Surely he may not will that he be executed.
futurum intentionale: Grice: “I’m obsessed with the future – unless most
Englishmen – hence my need to coin the ‘implicaturum,’ a future form!” -- Surely
intention has nothing to do with predictable truth. If Smith promises Jones a
job – he intends that Jones get a job. Then the world explodes, so Jones does
not get the job. Kant, Austin, or Grice, don’t care. A philosopher is not a
scientist. He is into ‘conceptual matters,’ about what is to have a good
intention, not whether the intention, in a future scenario, is realised or not.
If they are interested in ‘tense,’ as Prior was as Grice was with his
time-relative identity, it’s still because in the PRESENT, the emissor emits a
future-tense utterance. The future figures more prominently than anything
because in “Emissor communicates that p” there is the FUTURE ESSENTIAL. The
emissor intends that his addressee in a time later than the present will do
this or that. While Grice is always looking to cross the
credibility/desirability divide, there is a feature that is difficult to cross
in the bridge of asses. This is the shall vs. will. Grice is aware that ‘will,’
in the FIRST person, is not a matter of prediction. When Grice says “I will go
to Harborne,” that’s not a prediction. He firmly contrasts it with “I shall go
to Harborne” which is a perfect prediction in the indicative mode. “I will go
to Harborne” is in the ‘futurum intentionale.’ Grice is also aware that in the
SECOND and THIRD persons, ‘will’ reports something that the utterer must judge
unpredictable. An utterance like “Thou wilt go to London” and “He will go to
London” is in the ‘futurum indicativus.’ This is one nuance that Prichard
forgets in the analysis of ‘willing’ that Grice eventually adopts. Prichard
uses ‘will’ derivatively, and followed by a ‘that’-clause. Prichard quotes from
the New-World, where the dialect is slightly different. For William James had
said, “I will that the distant table slides over the floor toward me. And it
does not.” Since James is using ‘will’ in the first person, the utterance is
indeed NOT in the indicative, but the ‘intentional’ mode. In the case of the
‘communicatum,’ things get complicated, since U intends that A will believe
that… In which case, U’s intention (and thus will) is directed towards the
‘will’ of his addressee, too, even if it is merely to adopt a ‘belief.’ So what
would be the primary uses of the ‘will.’ In the first person, “I will go to
Harborne” is in the futurum intentionale. It is used to report the utterer’s
will. In the second and third person – “Thou will go to Harborne” and “He will
go to Harborne,” the utterer uses the futurum indicativum and utters a statement
which is predictable. Since analytic
philosophers specify the analysis in the third person (“U means that…”) one has
to be careful. For ‘futurum intentionale’ we have ‘will’ in the first person,
and ‘shall’ in the second and third persons. So for the first group, U means
that he SHALL go. In the second group, U means that his addressee or a third
party WILL go. Grice adopts a subscript variant, stick with ‘will,’ but add the
mode afterwards: so will-ind. will be ‘futurum indicativum,’ and will-int. will
be futurum intentionale. Grice distinguishes the ‘futurum imperativum.’ This
may be seen as a sub-class of the ‘futurum intentionale,’ as applied to the
second and third persons, to avoid the idea that one can issue a
‘self-command.’ Grice has a futurum imperativum, in Latin ending in -tō(te), used
to request someone to do something, or if something else happens first. “Sī
quid acciderit, scrībitō. If anything happens, write to me' (Cicero). ‘Ubi nōs
lāverimus, lavātō.’ 'When*we* have finished washing, *you* get washed.’
(Terence). ‘Crūdam si edēs, in acētum intinguitō.’ ‘If you eat cabbage raw, dip
it in vinegar.’ (Cato). ‘Rīdētō multum quī tē, Sextille, cinaedum dīxerit et
digitum porrigitō medium.’ 'Laugh loudly at anyone who calls you camp,
Sextillus, and stick up your middle finger at him.' (Martial). In Latin, some verbs have only a futurum
imperativum, e. g., scītō 'know', mementō 'remember'. In Latin, there is also a
third person imperative also ending in -tō, plural -ntō exists. It is used in
very formal contexts such as laws. ‘Iūsta imperia suntō, īsque cīvēs pārentō.’
'Orders must be just, and citizens must obey them' (Cicero). Other ways of
expressing a command or request are made with expressions such as cūrā ut 'take
care to...', fac ut 'see to it that...' or cavē nē 'be careful that you
don't...' Cūrā ut valeās. 'Make sure you keep well' (Cicero). Oddly, in Roman,
the futurum indicativum can be used for a polite commands. ‘Pīliae salūtem dīcēs
et Atticae.’ 'Will you please give my
regards to Pilia and Attica?' (Cicero. The OED has will, would. It is traced to
Old English willan, pres.t. wille, willaþ, pa. t. wolde. Grice was especially
interested to check Jamess and Prichards use of willing that, Prichards shall
will and the will/shall distinction; the present tense will; transitive uses,
with simple obj. or obj. clause; occas. intr. 1 trans. with simple obj.:
desire, wish for, have a mind to, `want (something); sometimes implying also
`intend, purpose. 1601 Shaks. (title) Twelfe Night, Or what you will. 1654
Whitlock Zootomia 44 Will what befalleth, and befall what will. 1734 tr.
Rollins Anc. Hist. V. 31 He that can do what ever he will is in great danger of
willing what he ought not. b intr. with well or ill, or trans. with sbs. of
similar meaning (e.g. good, health), usually with dat. of person: Wish (or
intend) well or ill (to some one), feel or cherish good-will or ill-will. Obs.
(cf. will v.2 1 b). See also well-willing; to will well that: to be willing
that. 1483 Caxton Gold. Leg. I wyl wel that thou say, and yf thou say ony good,
thou shalt be pesybly herde. Usage No. 2: trans. with obj. clause (with vb. in
pres. subj., or in periphrastic form with should), or acc. and inf.: Desire,
wish; sometimes implying also `intend, purpose (that something be done or
happen). 1548 Hutten Sum of Diuinitie K viij, God wylle all men to be saued;
enoting expression (usually authoritative) of a wish or intention: Determine,
decree, ordain, enjoin, give order (that something be done). 1528 Cromwell in
Merriman Life and Lett. (1902) I. 320 His grace then wille that thellection of
a new Dean shalbe emonges them of the colledge; spec. in a direction or
instruction in ones will or testament; hence, to direct by will (that something
be done). 1820 Giffords Compl. Engl. Lawyer. I do hereby will and direct that
my executrix..do excuse and release the said sum of 100l. to him; figurative usage. of an abstract thing (e.g.
reason, law): Demands, requires. 1597 Shaks. 2 Hen. IV, Our Battaile is more
full of Namess then yours Then Reason will, our hearts should be as good. Usage
No. 4 transf. (from 2). Intends to express, means; affirms, maintains. 1602
Dolman La Primaud. Fr. Acad. Hee will that this authority should be for a
principle of demonstration. 2 With dependent infinitive (normally without
"to"); desire to, wish to, have a mind to (do something); often also
implying intention. 1697 Ctess DAunoys Trav. I will not write to you often,
because I will always have a stock of News to tell you, which..is pretty long
in picking up. 1704 Locke Hum. Und. The
great Encomiasts of the Chineses, do all to a man agree and will convince us
that the Sect of the Literati are Atheists. 6 In relation to anothers desire or
requirement, or to an obligation of some kind: Am (is, are) disposed or willing
to, consent to; †in early use sometimes = deign or condescend to.With the (rare
and obs.) imper. use, as in quot. 1490, cf. b and the corresponding negative
use in 12 b. 1921 Times Lit. Suppl. 10 Feb. 88/3 Literature thrives where
people will read what they do not agree with, if it is good. b In 2nd person,
interrog., or in a dependent clause after beg or the like, expressing a request
(usually courteous; with emphasis, impatient). 1599 Shaks. Hen. V, ii. i. 47
Will you shogge off? 1605 1878 Hardy Ret. Native v. iii, O, O, O,..O, will you
have done! Usage No. 7 Expressing voluntary action, or conscious intention
directed to the doing of what is expressed by the principal verb (without
temporal reference as in 11, and without emphasis as in 10): = choose to
(choose v. B. 3 a). The proper word for this idea, which cannot be so precisely
expressed by any other. 1685 Baxter Paraphr., When God will tell us we shall
know. Usage No. 8 Expressing natural disposition to do something, and hence
habitual action: Has the habit, or `a way, of --ing; is addicted or accustomed
to --ing; habitually does; sometimes connoting `may be expected to (cf. 15).
1865 Ruskin Sesame, Men, by their nature, are prone to fight; they will fight
for any cause, or for none; expressing potentiality, capacity, or sufficiency:
Can, may, is able to, is capable of --ing; is (large) enough or sufficient
to.†it will not be: it cannot be done or brought to pass; it is all in vain.
So, †will it not be? 1833 N. Arnott Physics, The heart will beat after removal
from the body. Usage No. 10 As a strengthening of sense 7, expressing
determination, persistence, and the like (without temporal reference as in 11);
purposes to, is determined to. 1539 Bible (Great) Isa. lxvi. 6, I heare ye
voyce of the Lorde, that wyll rewarde, etc; recompence his enemyes;
emphatically. Is fully determined to; insists on or persists in --ing:
sometimes with mixture of sense 8. (In 1st pers. with implication of futurity,
as a strengthening of sense 11 a. Also fig. = must inevitably, is sure to. 1892
E. Reeves Homeward Bound viii. 239, I have spent 6,000 francs to come here..and
I will see it! c In phr. of ironical or critical force referring to anothers
assertion or opinion. Now arch. exc. in will have it; 1591 Shaks. 1 Hen. VI,
This is a Riddling Merchant for the nonce, He will be here, and yet he is not
here. 1728 Chambers Cycl., Honey, Some naturalists will have honey to be of a
different quality, according to the difference of the flowers..the bees suck it
from. Also, as auxiliary of the future tense with implication (entailment
rather than cancellable implicaturum) of intention, thus distinguished from
‘shall,’ v. B. 8, where see note); in 1st person: sometimes in slightly
stronger sense = intend to, mean to. 1600 Shaks. A.Y.L., To morrow will we be
married. 1607 Shaks. Cor., Ile run away Till I am bigger, but then Ile fight.
1777 Clara Reeve Champion of Virtue, Never fear it..I will speak to Joseph
about it. b In 2nd and 3rd pers., in questions or indirect statements. 1839
Lane Arab. Nts., I will cure thee
without giving thee to drink any potion When King Yoonán heard his words,
he..said.., How wilt thou do this? c will do (with omission of "I"):
an expression of willingness to carry out a request. Cf. wilco. colloq. 1967 L.
White Crimshaw Memorandum, `And find out where the bastard was `Will do, Jim
said. 13 In 1st pers., expressing immediate intention: "I will" = `I
am now going to, `I proceed at once to. 1885 Mrs. Alexander At Bay, Very well;
I will wish you good-evening. b In 1st pers. pl., expressing a proposal: we
will (†wule we) = `let us. 1798 Coleridge Nightingale 4 Come, we will rest on
this old mossy bridge!, c figurative, as in It will rain, (in 3rd pers.) of a
thing: Is ready to, is on the point of --ing. 1225 Ancr. R. A treou þet wule
uallen, me underset hit mid on oðer treou. 14 In 2nd and 3rd pers., as
auxiliary expressing mere futurity, forming (with pres. inf.) the future, and
(with pf. inf.) the future pf. tense: corresponding to "shall" in the
1st pers. (see note s.v. shall v. B. 8). 1847 Tennyson Princess iii. 12 Rest,
rest, on mothers breast, Father will come to thee soon. b As auxiliary of
future substituted for the imper. in mild injunctions or requests. 1876 Ruskin
St. Marks Rest. That they should use their own balances, weights, and measures;
(not by any means false ones, you will please to observe). 15 As auxiliary of
future expressing a contingent event, or a result to be expected, in a supposed
case or under particular conditions (with the condition expressed by a
conditional, temporal, or imper. clause, or otherwise implied). 1861 M.
Pattison Ess. The lover of the
Elizabethan drama will readily recal many such allusions; b with pers.sSubjects
(usually 1st pers. sing.), expressing a voluntary act or choice in a supposed
case, or a conditional promise or undertaking: esp. in asseverations, e.g. I
will die sooner than, I’ll be hanged if, etc.). 1898 H. S. Merriman Rodens
Corner. But I will be hanged if I see what it all means, now; xpressing a
determinate or necessary consequence (without the notion of futurity). 1887
Fowler Deductive Logic, From what has been said it will be seen that I do not
agree with Mr. Mill. Mod. If, in a syllogism, the middle term be not
distributed in either premiss, there will be no conclusion; ith the notion of
futurity obscured or lost: = will prove or turn out to, will be found on
inquiry to; may be supposed to, presumably does. Hence (chiefly Sc. and north.
dial.) in estimates of amount, or in uncertain or approximate statements, the
future becoming equivalent to a present with qualification: e.g. it will be =
`I think it is or `it is about; what will that be? = `what do you think that
is? 1584 Hornby Priory in Craven Gloss. Where on 40 Acres there will be xiij.s.
iv.d. per acre yerely for rent. 1791 Grose Olio (1792) 106, I believe he will
be an Irishman. 1791 Grose Olio. C. How far is it to Dumfries? W. It will be
twenty miles. 1812 Brackenridge Views Louisiana, The agriculture of this
territory will be very similar to that of Kentucky. 1876 Whitby Gloss. sThis
word we have only once heard, and that will be twenty years ago. 16 Used where
"shall" is now the normal auxiliary, chiefly in expressing mere
futurity: since 17th c. almost exclusively in Scottish, Irish, provincial, or
extra-British use (see shall. 1602 Shaks. Ham. I will win for him if I can: if
not, Ile gaine nothing but my shame, and the odde hits. 1825 Scott in Lockhart
Ballantyne-humbug. I expect we will have some good singing. 1875 E. H. Dering
Sherborne. `Will I start, sir? asked the Irish groom. Usage No. 3 Elliptical
and quasi-elliptical uses; n absol. use, or with ellipsis of obj. clause as in
2: in meaning corresponding to senses 5-7.if you will is sometimes used
parenthetically to qualify a word or phrase: = `if you wish it to be so called,
`if you choose or prefer to call it so. 1696 Whiston The. Earth. Gravity
depends entirely on the constant and efficacious, and, if you will, the
supernatural and miraculous Influence of Almighty God. 1876 Ruskin St. Marks
Rest. Very savage! monstrous! if you will. b In parenthetic phr. if God will
(†also will God, rarely God will), God willing: if it be the will of God,
`D.V.In OE. Gode willi&asg.ende (will v.2) = L. Deo volente. 1716
Strype in Thoresbys Lett. Next week, God willing, I take my journey to my
Rectory in Sussex; fig. Demands, requires (absol. or ellipt. use of 3 c). 1511
Reg. Privy Seal Scot. That na seculare personis have intrometting with thaim
uther wais than law will; I will well: I assent, `I should think so indeed.
(Cf. F. je veux bien.) Usage No. 18: with ellipsis of a vb. of motion. 1885
Bridges Eros and Psyche Aug. I will to thee oer the stream afloat. Usage No.
19: with ellipsis of active inf. to be supplied from the context. 1836 Dickens
Sk. Boz, Steam Excurs., `Will you go on deck? `No, I will not. This was said
with a most determined air. 1853 Dickens Bleak Ho. lii, I cant believe it. Its
not that I dont or I wont. I cant! 1885 Mrs. Alexander Valeries Fate vi, `Do
you know that all the people in the house will think it very shocking of me to
walk with you?.. `The deuce they will!; With generalized ellipsis, esp. in
proverbial saying (now usually as in quot. 1562, with will for would). 1639 J.
Clarke Paroem. 237 He that may and will not, when he would he shall not. c With
so or that substituted for the omitted inf. phr.: now usually placed at the
beginning of the sentence. 1596 Shaks. Tam. Shr. Hor. I promist we would beare
his charge of wooing Gremio. And so we wil. d Idiomatically used in a
qualifying phr. with relative, equivalent to a phr. with indef. relative in
-ever; often with a thing as subj., becoming a mere synonym of may: e.g. shout
as loud as you will = `however loud you (choose to) shout; come what will =
`whatever may come; be that as it will = `however that may be. 1732 Pope Mor.
Ess. The ruling Passion, be it what it will, The ruling Passion conquers Reason
still. 20 With ellipsis of pass. inf. A. 1774 Goldsm. Surv. Exp. Philos. The
airs force is compounded of its swiftness and density, and as these are encreased,
so will the force of the wind; in const. where the ellipsis may be either of an
obj. clause or of an inf. a In a disjunctive qualifying clause or phr. usually
parenthetic, as whether he will or no, will he or not, (with pron. omitted)
will or no, (with or omitted) will he will he not, will he nill he (see VI.
below and willy-nilly), etc.In quot. 1592 vaguely = `one way or another, `in
any case. For the distinction between should and would, v. note s.v. shall; in
a noun-clause expressing the object of desire, advice, or request, usually with
a person as subj., implying voluntary action as the desired end: thus
distinguished from should, which may be used when the persons will is not in
view. Also (almost always after wish) with a thing as Subjects, in which case
should can never be substituted because it would suggest the idea of command or
compulsion instead of mere desire. Cf. shall; will; willest; willeth; wills;
willed (wIld); also: willian, willi, wyll, wille, wil, will, willode, will,
wyllede, wylled, willyd, ied, -it, -id, willed; wijld, wilde, wild, willid,
-yd, wylled,willet, willed; willd(e, wild., OE. willian wk. vb. = German
“willen.” f. will sb.1, 1 trans. to wish, desire; sometimes with implication of
intention: = will. 1400 Lat. and Eng. Prov. He þt a lytul me 3euyth to me
wyllyth optat longe lyffe. 1548 Udall, etc. Erasm. Par. Matt. v. 21-24 Who so
euer hath gotten to hymselfe the charitie of the gospell, whyche wylleth wel to
them that wylleth yll. 1581 A. Hall Iliad, By Mineruas helpe, who willes you
all the ill she may. A. 1875 Tennyson Q. Mary i. iv, A great party in the state
Wills me to wed her; To assert, affirm: = will v.1 B. 4. 1614 Selden Titles
Hon. None of this excludes Vnction before, but only wils him the first
annointed by the Pope. 2 a to direct by ones will or testament (that something
be done, or something to be done); to dispose of by will; to bequeath or
devise; to determine by the will; to attempt to cause, aim at effecting by
exercise of will; to set the mind with conscious intention to the performance
or occurrence of something; to choose or decide to do something, or that
something shall be done or happen. Const. with simple obj., acc. and inf.,
simple inf. (now always with to), or obj. clause; also absol. or intr. (with as
or so). Nearly coinciding in meaning with will v.1 7, but with more explicit
reference to the mental process of volition. 1630 Prynne Anti-Armin. 119 He had
onely a power, not to fall into sinne vnlesse he willed it. 1667 Milton P.L. So
absolute she seems..that what she wills to do or say, Seems wisest. 1710 J.
Clarke tr. Rohaults Nat. Philos. If I will to move my Arm, it is presently
moved. 1712 Berkeley Pass. Obed. He that willeth the end, doth will the
necessary means conducive to that end. 1837 Carlyle Fr. Rev. All shall be as
God wills. 1880 Meredith Tragic Com. So great, heroical, giant-like, that what
he wills must be. 1896 Housman Shropsh. Lad xxx, Others, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst; intr. to exercise the will; to perform
the mental act of volition. 1594 Hooker Eccl. Pol. To will, is to bend our
soules to the hauing or doing of that which they see to be good. 1830
Mackintosh Eth. Philos. Wks.. But what could induce such a being to will or to
act? 1867 A. P. Forbes Explan. Is this infinitely powerful and intelligent
Being free? wills He? loves He? c trans. To bring or get (into, out of, etc.)
by exercise of will. 1850 L. Hunt Table-t. (1882) 184 Victims of opium have
been known to be unable to will themselves out of the chair in which they were
sitting. d To control (another person), or induce (another) to do something, by
the mere exercise of ones will, as in hypnotism. 1882 Proc. Soc. Psych.
Research I. The one to be `willed would go to the other end of the house, if
desired, whilst we agreed upon the thing to be done. 1886 19th Cent. They are
what is called `willed to do certain things desired by the ladies or gentlemen
who have hold of them. 1897 A. Lang Dreams & Ghosts iii. 59 A young
lady, who believed that she could play the `willing game successfully without
touching the person `willed; to express or communicate ones will or wish with
regard to something, with various shades of meaning, cf. will, v.1 3.,
specifically: a to enjoin, order; to decree, ordain, a) with personal obj.,
usually with inf. or clause. 1481 Cov. Leet Bk. 496 We desire and also will you
that vnto oure seid seruaunt ye yeue your aid. 1547 Edw. VI in Rymer Foedera,
We Wyll and Commaunde yowe to Procede in the seid Matters. 1568 Grafton Chron.,
Their sute was smally regarded, and shortly after they were willed to silence.
1588 Lambarde Eiren. If a man do lie in awaite to rob me, and (drawing his
sword upon me) he willeth me to deliver my money. 1591 Shaks. 1 Hen. VI We doe
no otherwise then wee are willd. 1596 Nashe Saffron Walden P 4, Vp he was had
and.willed to deliuer vp his weapon. 1656 Hales Gold. Rem. The King in the
Gospel, that made a Feast, and..willed his servants to go out to the high-ways
side. 1799 Nelson in Nicolas Disp., Willing and requiring all Officers and men
to obey you; 1565 Cooper Thesaurus s.v. Classicum, By sounde of trumpet to will
scilence. 1612 Bacon Ess., Of Empire. It is common with Princes (saith Tacitus)
to will contradictories. 1697 Dryden Æneis i. 112 Tis yours, O Queen! to will
The Work, which Duty binds me to fulfil. 1877 Tennyson Harold vi. i, Get thou
into thy cloister as the king Willd it.; to pray, request, entreat; = desire v.
6. 1454 Paston Lett. Suppl. As for the questyon that ye wylled me to aske my lord,
I fond hym yet at no good leyser. 1564 Haward tr. Eutropius. The Romaines sent
ambassadoures to him, to wyll him to cease from battayle. 1581 A. Hall Iliad,
His errand done, as he was willde, he toke his flight from thence. 1631 [Mabbe]
Celestina. Did I not will you I should not be wakened? 1690 Dryden Amphitryon
i. i, He has sent me to will and require you to make a swinging long Night for
him; fig. of a thing, to require, demand; also, to induce, persuade a person to
do something. 1445 in Anglia. Constaunce willeth also that thou doo noughte
with weyke corage. Cable and Baugh note that one important s. of prescriptions
that now form part of all our grammars -- that governing the use of will and
shall -- has its origin in this period. Previous to 1622 no grammar recognized
any distinction between will and shall. In 1653 Wallis in his Grammatica
Linguae Anglicanae states in Latin and for the benefit of Europeans that
Subjectsive intention is expressed by will in the first person, by shall in the
second and third, while simple factual indicative predictable futurity is
expressed by shall in the first person, by will in the second and third. It is
not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the use in questions
and subordinate clauses is explicitly defined. In 1755 Johnson, in his
Dictionary, states the rule for questions, and in 1765 William Ward, in his
Grammar, draws up for the first time the full set of prescriptions that
underlies, with individual variations, the rules found in later tracts. Wards
pronouncements are not followed generally by other grammarians until Lindley
Murray gives them greater currency in 1795. Since about 1825 they have often
been repeated in grammars, v. Fries, The periphrastic future with will and
shall. Will qua modal auxiliary never had an s. The absence of conjugation is a
very old common Germanic phenomenon. OE 3rd person present indicative of willan
(and of the preterite-present verbs) is not distinct from the 1st person
present indicative. That dates back at least to CGmc, or further if one looks
just as the forms and ignore tense and/or mood). Re: Prichard: "Prichard
wills that he go to London. This is Prichards example, admired by Grice
("but I expect not pleasing to Maucaulays ears"). The -s is introduced
to indicate a difference between the modal and main verb use (as in Prichard
and Grice) of will. In fact, will, qua modal, has never been used with a
to-infinitive. OE uses present-tense forms to refer to future events as well as
willan and sculan. willan would give a volitional nuance; sculan, an
obligational nuance. Its difficult to find an example of weorthan used to
express the future, but that doesnt mean it didnt happen. In insensitive
utterers, will has very little of volition about it, unless one follows Walliss
observation for for I will vs. I shall. Most probably use ll, or be going
to for the future.
fuzzy implicaturum. Grice loved ‘fuzzy,’ “if only because it’s one of the few
non-Graeco-Roman philosophical terms!” -- fuzzy set, a set in which membership is a
matter of degree. In classical set theory, for every set S and thing x, either
x is a member of S or x is not. In fuzzy set theory, things x can be members of
sets S to any degree between 0 and 1, inclusive. Degree 1 corresponds to ‘is a
member of’ and 0 corresponds to ‘is not’; the intermediate degrees are degrees
of vagueness or uncertainty. Example: Let S be the set of men who are bald at
age forty. L. A. Zadeh developed a logic of fuzzy sets as the basis for a logic
of vague predicates. A fuzzy set can be represented mathematically as a
function from a given universe into the interval [0, 1]. Zadeh tried to interpret Grice alla fuzzy in
“Pragmatics”
gadamer: philosopher, the
leading proponent of hermeneutics in the second half of the twentieth century.
He studied at Marburg in the 0s with Natorp and Heidegger. His first book,
Plato’s Dialectical Ethics 1, bears their imprint and reflects his abiding
interest in Grecian philosophy. Truth and Method 0 established Gadamer as an
original thinker and had an impact on a variety of disciplines outside
philosophy, including theology, legal theory, and literary criticism. The three
parts of Truth and Method combine to displace the scientific conceptions of
truth and method as the model for understanding in the human sciences. In the
first part, which presents itself as a critique of the abstraction inherent in
aesthetic consciousness, Gadamer argues that artworks make a claim to truth.
Later Gadamer draws on the play of art in the experience of the beautiful to
offer an analogy to how a text draws its readers into the event of truth by
making a claim on them. In the central portion of the book Gadamer presents
tradition as a condition of understanding. Tradition is not for him an object
of historical knowledge, but part of one’s very being. The final section of
Truth and Method is concerned with language as the site of tradition. Gadamer
sought to shift the focus of hermeneutics from the problems of obscurity and
misunderstanding to the community of understanding that the participants in a
dialogue share through language. Gadamer was involved in three debates that
define his philosophical contribution. The first was an ongoing debate with
Heidegger reflected throughout Gadamer’s corpus. Gadamer did not accept all of
the innovations that Heidegger introduced into his thinking in the 0s,
particularly his reconstruction of the history of philosophy as the history of
being. Gadamer also rejected Heidegger’s elevation of Hölderlin to the status
of an authority. Gadamer’s greater accessibility led Habermas to characterize
Gadamer’s contribution as that of having “urbanized the Heideggerian province.”
The second debate was with Habermas himself. Habermas criticized Gadamer’s
rejection of the Enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice.” Whereas
Habermas objected to the conservatism inherent in Gadamer’s rehabilitation of
prejudice, Gadamer explained that he was only setting out the conditions for
understanding, conditions that did not exclude the possibility of radical
change. The third debate, which formed the basis of Dialogue and Deconstruction
9, was with Derrida. Derridean deconstruction is indebted to Heidegger’s later
philosophy and so this debate was in part about the direction philosophy should
take after Heidegger. However, many observers concluded that there was no real
engagement between Gadamer and Derrida. To some it seemed that Derrida, by
refusing to accept the terms on which Gadamer insisted dialogue should take
place, had exposed the limits imposed by hermeneutics. To others it was
confirmation that any attempt to circumvent the conditions of dialogue
specified by Gadamerian hermeneutics is selfdefeating.
galen: philosopher, he traveled
extensively in the Greco-Roman world before settling in Rome and becoming court
physician to Marcus Aurelius. His philosophical interests lay mainly in the
philosophy of science On the Therapeutic Method and nature On the Function of
Parts, and in logic Introduction to Logic, in which he develops a crude but
pioneering treatment of the logic of relations. Galen espoused an extreme form
of directed teleology in natural explanation, and sought to develop a
syncretist picture of cause and explanation drawing on Plato, Aristotle, the
Stoics, and preceding medical writers, notably Hippocrates, whose views he
attempted to harmonize with those of Plato On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and
Plato. He wrote on philosophical psychology On the Passions and Errors of the
Soul; his materialist account of mind Mental Characteristics Are Caused by
Bodily Conditions is notable for its caution in approaching issues such as the
actual nature of the substance of the soul and the age and structure of the
universe that he regarded as undecidable. In physiology, he adopted a version
of the four-humor theory, that health consists in an appropriate balance of
four basic bodily constituents blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm, and
disease in a corresponding imbalance a view owed ultimately to Hippocrates. He
sided with the rationalist physicians against the empiricists, holding that it
was possible to elaborate and to support theories concerning the fundamentals
of the human body; but he stressed the importance of observation and
experiment, in particular in anatomy he discovered the function of the
recurrent laryngeal nerve by dissection and ligation. Via the Arabic tradition,
Galen became the most influential doctor of the ancient world; his influence
persisted, in spite of the discoveries of the seventeenth century, until the
end of the nineteenth century. He also wrote extensively on semantics, but
these texts are lost.
galileo
galilei:
philosopher. His Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems defends
Copernicus by arguing against the major tenets of the Aristotelian cosmology.
On his view, one kind of motion replaces the multiple distinct celestial and
terrestrial motions of Aristotle; mathematics is applicable to the real world;
and explanation of natural events appeals to efficient causes alone, not to
hypothesized natural ends. Galileo was called before the Inquisition, was made
to recant his Copernican views, and spent the last years of his life under
house arrest. Discourse concerning Two New Sciences 1638 created the modern
science of mechanics: it proved the laws of free fall, thus making it possible
to study accelerated motions; asserted the principle of the independence of
forces; and proposed a theory of parabolic ballistics. His work was developed
by Huygens and Newton. Galileo’s scientific and technological achievements were
prodigious. He invented an air thermoscope, a device for raising water, and a
computer for calculating quantities in geometry and ballistics. His discoveries
in pure science included the isochronism of the pendulum and the hydrostatic
balance. His telescopic observations led to the discovery of four of Jupiter’s
satellites the Medicean Stars, the moon’s mountains, sunspots, the moon’s
libration, and the nature of the Milky Way. In methodology Galileo accepted the
ancient Grecian ideal of demonstrative science, and employed the method of
retroductive inference, whereby the phenomena under investigation are
attributed to remote causes. Much of his work utilizes the hypothetico-deductive
method.
Galluppi: essential
Italian philosopher. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Galluppi," per
Il Club Anglo-Italiano,The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
gambler’s
fallacy:
also called Monte Carlo fallacy, the fallacy of supposing, of a sequence of
independent events, that the probabilities of later outcomes must increase or
decrease to “compensate” for earlier outcomes. For example, since by
Bernoulli’s theorem in a long run of tosses of a fair coin it is very probable
that the coin will come up heads roughly half the time, one might think that a
coin that has not come up heads recently must be “due” to come up heads must have a probability greater than one-half
of doing so. But this is a misunderstanding of the law of large numbers, which
requires no such compensating tendencies of the coin. The probability of heads
remains one-half for each toss despite the preponderance, so far, of tails. In
the sufficiently long run what “compensates” for the presence of improbably
long subsequences in which, say, tails strongly predominate, is simply that
such subsequences occur rarely and therefore have only a slight effect on the
statistical character of the whole.
conversational
game theory:
Grice: “It was Austin who made me see the philosophy of football!” -- Grice for
‘homo ludens’. In “Logic and conversation,” Grice uses the phrases, “the game
of conversation,” “conversational game,” “conversational move,” “the
conversational rules,” – so he knew he was echoing Neumann and Morgenstern. J.
Hintikka, “Grice and game theory.” the theory of the structure of, and the
rational procedures (or strategies) for performing in, games or game-like human
interactions. Although there are forerunners, game theory is virtually invented
by Neumann and Morgenstern. Its most striking feature is its compact
representation of interactions of at least two players; e. g. two players may
face two choices each, and in combination these choices produce four possible
outcomes. Actual choices are of strategies, not of outcomes, although it is
assessments of outcomes that recommend this or that procedure, maxim,
imperative, or strategy. To do well in a game, even for each player to do well,
as is often possible, generally requires taking the other player’s position, interest,
and goal, into account. Hence, to evaluate an imperative or rule or strategiy
directly, without reference to the outcomes they might produce in interaction
with others, is conspicuously perverse. It is not surprising, therefore, that
in meta-ethics, game theory has been preeminently applied to utilitarianianism.
As the numbers of players and rational procedure, guideline or strategies rise,
the complexity of the game of conversation increases geometrically. If players
have *2* strategies each and each ranks the four possible outcomes without
ties, there are already *78* strategically distinct conversations. Even minor
real-life interactions may have astronomically greater complexity. Grice once
complained to Hintikka that this makes game theory ‘useless,’ or ‘otiose.’ Alternatively,
one can note that this makes it realistic and helps us understand why real-life
choices are at least as complex as they sometimes seem. To complicate matters
further, conversationalists can choose over probabilistic combinations of their
pure rational guidelines or strategies. Hence, the original 4 outcomes in a
simple 2 $ 2 game define a continuum of potential outcomes. After noting the
structure of the game of conversation, one might then be struck by an immediate
implication of this mere description. A rational agent may be supposed to attempt
to maximize his potential or expected outcome in the game of conversation. But
as there are at least two players in the game of conversation, in general
conversationalists cannot all maximize simultaneously over their expected
outcomes while assuming that all others are doing likewise. This is an
analytical principle. In general, we cannot maximize over two functions
simultaneously. The general notion of the greatest good of the greatest number,
e. g., is incoherent. Hence, in inter-active choice contexts, the simple notion
of economic rationality is incoherent. Virtually all of early game theory was
dedicated to finding an alternative principle for resolving conversational game
interactions. There are now many of what Grice calls a “solution theory,” most
of which are about this or that outcome rather than this or that rational
guideline or strategy they stipulate which outcomes or range of outcomes is
game-theoretically “rational.” There is little consensus on how to generalize
from the ordinary rationality of merely choosing more rather than less and of
displaying consistent preferences to the general choice of strategies in games.
A pay-off in early game theory is almost always represented in a cardinal,
transferable utility. A transferable utility is an odd notion that is evidently
introduced to avoid the disdain with which philosophers then treated
interpersonal comparisons of utility. It seems to be analogous to money. One
could say that the theory is one of wealth maximization. In the early theory, the
“rationality” conditions are as follows.In general, if the sums of the pay-offs
to each players in various outcomes differ, it is assumed that a rational
player will manage to divide the largest possible payoff with the other player.
2 No rational agent will accept a payoff below the “security level” obtainable
even if all the other player or players really form a coalition against the
individual. Sometimes it is also assumed that no group of players will
rationally accept less than it could get as its group security level but in some games, no outcome can meet this
condition. This is an odd combination of elements. The collective elements are
plausibly thought of as merely predictive. If we individually wish to do well,
we should combine efforts to help us do best AS A CONVERSATIONAL DYAD. But what
we want is a theory that converts two individual preferences into one
collective result – Grice’s conversational shared goal of influencing and being
influenced by others. Unfortunately, to put a move doing just this in the
foundations of the theory is question-begging. Our fundamental burden is to
determine whether a theory of subjective rationality MAY produce an
inter-subjectively good result, not to stipulate that it must. In the theory
with cardinal, additive payoffs, we can divide games. There is the constant-sum
game, in which the sum of all players’ payoffs in each outcome is a constant,
and variable sum games. A zero-sum games is a special case of a constant sum
game. Two-player constant sum games are games of pure conversational
‘conflict.’ Each player’s gain is the other’s loss. In constant sum games with
more than two players and in all variable sum games, there is generally reason
for coalition formation to improve payoffs to members of the coalition. A game
without transferable utility, such as a games in which players have only
ordinal preferences, may be characterized as a game of pure conflict or of pure
co-ordination (or co-operation) when players’ preference orderings over
outcomes are, respectively, opposite or identical, or as games of mixed motive
when their orderings are partly the same and partly reversed. Grice’s nalysis
of such games is evidently less tractable than that of games with cardinal,
additive utility, and their theory is only beginning to be extensively
developed by Griceians. Despite the apparent circularity of the rationality
assumptions of early game theory, it is the game theorists’ prisoner’s dilemma
that makes clear that compelling subjectivistic principles of choice can produce
an inter-subjective deficient outcome. This game given its catchy but inapt
name. If they play it in isolation from any other interaction between them, two
players in this game can each do what seems individually best and reach an
outcome that both consider inferior to the outcome that results from making
opposite strategy choices. Even with the knowledge that this is the problem
they face, the players still have incentive to choose the strategies that
jointly produce the inferior outcome. The prisoner’s dilemma involves both
coordination (or co-operation) and conflict. It has played a central role in
discussions of Griceian conversational pragmatics. Games that predominantly
involve coordination (or cooperation), such as when we coordinate in all driving
on the right or all on the left, have a similarly central role. The
understanding of both classes of games has been read into the philosophy of
Hobbes and Hume and into “mutual advantage” theories of justice.
gassendi: philosopher who
advocates a via media to scientific knowledge about the empirically observable
material world that avoids both the dogmatism of Cartesians, who claimed to
have certain knowledge, and the skepticism of Montaigne and Charron, who
doubted that we have knowledge about anything. Gassendi presented Epicurean
atomism as a model for explaining how bodies are structured and interact. He
advanced a hypothetico-deductive method by proposing that experiments should be
used to test mechanistic hypotheses. Like the ancient Pyrrhonian Skeptics, he
did not challenge the immediate reports of our senses; but unlike them he
argued that while we cannot have knowledge of the inner essences of things, we
can develop a reliable science of the world of appearances. In this he
exemplified the mitigated skepticism of modern science that is always open to
revision on the basis of empirical evidence. Gassendi’s first book,
Exercitationes Paradoxicae Adversis Aristoteleos 1624, is an attack on
Aristotle. He is best known as the author of the fifth set of objections to
Descartes’s Meditations1641, in which Gassendi proposed that even clear and
distinct ideas may represent no objects outside our minds, a possibility that
Descartes called the objection of objections, but dismissed as destructive of
all reason. Gassendi’s Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri 1649 contains his
development of Epicurean philosophy and science. His elaboration of the
mechanistic atomic model and his advocacy of experimental testing of hypotheses
were crucially important in the rise of modern science. Gassendi’s career as a
Catholic priest, Epicurean atomist, mitigated skeptic, and mechanistic
scientist presents a puzzle as do the
careers of several other philosopher-priests in the seventeenth century concerning his true beliefs. On the one hand,
he professed faith and set aside Christian doctrine as not open to challenge.
On the other hand, he utilized an arsenal of skeptical arguments that was
beginning to undermine and would eventually destroy the rational foundations of
the church. Gassendi thus appears to be of a type almost unknown today, a
thinker indifferent to the apparent discrepancy between his belief in Christian
doctrine and his advocacy of materialist science.
gay: j. philosopher Grice read quite a
lot, who tried to reconcile divine command theory and utilitarianism. The son
of a minister, Gay was elected a fellow of Sidney Sussex , Cambridge, where he
taught Grecian philosophy. His essay, “Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental
Principle of Virtue or Morality” argues that obligation is founded on the will
of God, which, because people are destined to be happy, directs us to act to
promote the general happiness. Gay offers an associationist psychology
according to which we pursue objects that have come to be associated with
happiness e.g. money, regardless of whether they now make us happy, and argues,
contra Hutcheson, that our moral sense is conditioned rather than natural.
Gay’s blend of utilitarianism with associationist psychology gave David Hartley
the basis for his moral psychology, which later influenced Bentham in his
formulation of classical utilitarianism.
burlæus: Burleigh’s donkey
– Grice preferred the spelling “Gualterus Burlaeus.” “One would hardly realise
it’s Irish to the backbone!” – Grice. Geach’s donkey: geach, Peter b.6, English
philosopher and logician whose main work has been in logic and philosophy of
language. A great admirer of McTaggart, he has published a sympathetic
exposition of the latter’s work Truth, Love and Immortality, 9, and has always
aimed to emulate what he sees as the clarity and rigor of the Scottish
idealist’s thought. Greatly influenced by Frege and Vitters, Geach is
particularly noted for his powerful use of what he calls “the Frege point,”
better called “the Frege-Geach point,” that the same thought may occur as
asserted or unasserted and yet retain the same truth-value. The point has been
used by Geach to refute ascriptivist theories of responsibility, and can be
employed against noncognitivist theories of ethics, which are said to face the
Frege-Geach problem of accounting for the sense of moral ascriptions in
contexts like ‘If he did wrong, he will be punished’. He is also noted for
helping to bring Frege to the English-speaking world, through co-translations
with Max Black 9 88. In logic he is known for proving, independently of Quine,
a contradiction in Frege’s way out of Russell’s paradox Mind, 6, and for his
defense of modern Fregean-Russellian logic against traditional
Aristotelian-Scholastic logic. He also has a deep admiration for the Polish
logicians. In metaphysics, Geach is known for his defense of relative identity,
the thesis that an object a can be the same F where F is a kind-term as an
object b while not being the same G, even though a and b are both G’s. His spirited
defense of the thesis has been met by equally vigorous attacks, and it has not
received wide acceptance. An obvious application of the thesis is to the
defense of the doctrine of the Trinity e.g., the Father is the same god as the
Son but not the same person, which has caught the attention of some
philosophers of religion. Geach’s main works include Mental Acts 8, which
attacks dispositional theories of mind, Reference and Generality 2, which
contains much important work on logic, and the collection Logic Matters 2. A
notable defender of Catholicism despite his animadversions against Scholastic
logic, his religious views find their greatest exposure in God and the Soul 9,
Providence and Evil 7, and The Virtues 7. He is married to the philosopher
Elizabeth Anscombe.
Grice’s
genitorial programme
– A type of ideal observer theory -- demiurge from Grecian demiourgos,
‘artisan’, ‘craftsman’, a deity who shapes the material world from the
preexisting chaos. Plato introduces the demiurge in his Timaeus. Because he is
perfectly good, the demiurge wishes to communicate his own goodness. Using the
Forms as a model, he shapes the initial chaos into the best possible image of
these eternal and immutable archetypes. The visible world is the result.
Although the demiurge is the highest god and the best of causes, he should not
be identified with the God of theism. His ontological and axiological status is
lower than that of the Forms, especially the Form of the Good. He is also
limited. The material he employs is not created by him. Furthermore, it is
disorderly and indeterminate, and thus partially resists his rational ordering.
In gnosticism, the demiurge is the ignorant, weak, and evil or else morally
limited cause of the cosmos. In the modern era the term has occasionally been
used for a deity who is limited in power or knowledge. Its first occurrence in
this sense appears to be in J. S. Mill’s Theism 1874.
gentile: g. idealist
philosopher. He taught philosophy at Pisa. Gentile rejects Hegel’s dialectics
as the process of an objectified thought. Gentile’s actualism or actual
idealism claims that only the pure act of thinking or the transcendental subject
can undergo a dialectical process. All reality, such as nature, God, good, and
evil, is immanent in the dialectics of the transcendental subject, which is
distinct from the empirical subject. Among his major works are “La teoria
generale dello spirito come atto puro” and “Sistema di logica come teoria del
conoscere.” Gentile sees conversation is a concerted act that overcomes the apparent
difficulties of inter-subjectivity and realizes a unity within two transcendental
subjects. Actualism was pretty influential. With Croce’s historicism, it
influenced two Oxonian idealists discussed by H. P. Grice: Bernard Bosanquet
and R. G. Collingwood (vide: H. P. Grice, “Metaphysics,” in D. F. Pears, The
Nature of Metaphysics, London, Macmillan). Refs.: Luigi Speranza, The
Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice – Conversation and inter-subjectivity.
genus:
gender.
H. P. Grice calls Austin an artless sexist when referring to the trouser word.
We see how after Austin’s death, Grice more and more loses his reverential
attitude towards the ‘school master’ and shows Austin for what he is! Gender implicaturum
– Most languages have three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter (or
epicene, or common). feminist epistemology, epistemology from a feminist
perspective. It investigates the relevance that the gender of the
inquirer/knower has to epistemic practices, including the theoretical practice
of epistemology. It is typified both by themes that are exclusively feminist in
that they could arise only from a critical attention to gender, and by themes
that are non-exclusively feminist in that they might arise from other
politicizing theoretical perspectives besides feminism. A central, exclusively
feminist theme is the relation between philosophical conceptions of reason and
cultural conceptions of masculinity. Here a historicist stance must be adopted,
so that philosophy is conceived as the product of historically and culturally
situated hence gendered authors. This stance brings certain patterns of
intellectual association into view
patterns, perhaps, of alignment between philosophical conceptions of
reason as contrasted with emotion or intuition, and cultural conceptions of
masculinity as contrasted with femininity. A central, non-exclusively feminist
theme might be called “social-ism” in epistemology. It has two main
tributaries: political philosophy, in the form of Marx’s historical materialism;
and philosophy of science, in the form of either Quinean naturalism or Kuhnian
historicism. The first has resulted in feminist standpoint theory, which adapts
and develops the Marxian idea that different social groups have different
epistemic standpoints, where the material positioning of one of the groups is
said to bestow an epistemic privilege. The second has resulted in feminist work
in philosophy of science which tries to show that not only epistemic values but
also non-epistemic e.g. gendered values are of necessity sometimes an influence
in the generation of scientific theories. If this can be shown, then an
important feminist project suggests itself: to work out a rationale for
regulating the influence of these values so that science may be more
self-transparent and more responsible. By attempting to reveal the
epistemological implications of the fact that knowers are diversely situated in
social relations of identity and power, feminist epistemology represents a
radicalizing innovation in the analytic tradition, which has typically assumed
an asocial conception of the epistemic subject, and of the philosopher. --
feminist philosophy, a discussion of philosophical concerns that refuses to
identify the human experience with the male experience. Writing from a variety
of perspectives, feminist philosophers challenge several areas of traditional
philosophy on the grounds that they fail 1 to take seriously women’s interests,
identities, and issues; and 2 to recognize women’s ways of being, thinking, and
doing as valuable as those of men. Feminist philosophers fault traditional
metaphysics for splitting the self from the other and the mind from the body;
for wondering whether “other minds” exist and whether personal identity depends
more on memories or on physical characteristics. Because feminist philosophers
reject all forms of ontological dualism, they stress the ways in which
individuals interpenetrate each other’s psyches through empathy, and the ways
in which the mind and body coconstitute each other. Because Western culture has
associated rationality with “masculinity” and emotionality with “femininity,”
traditional epistemologists have often concluded that women are less human than
men. For this reason, feminist philosophers argue that reason and emotion are
symbiotically related, coequal sources of knowledge. Feminist philosophers also
argue that Cartesian knowledge, for all its certainty and clarity, is very
limFechner’s law feminist philosophy 305
305 ited. People want to know more than that they exist; they want to
know what other people are thinking and feeling. Feminist philosophers also
observe that traditional philosophy of science is not as objective as it claims
to be. Whereas traditional philosophers of science often associate scientific
success with scientists’ ability to control, rule, and otherwise dominate
nature, feminist philosophers of science associate scientific success with
scientists’ ability to listen to nature’s self-revelations. Since it willingly
yields abstract theory to the testimony of concrete fact, a science that
listens to what nature says is probably more objective than one that does not.
Feminist philosophers also criticize traditional ethics and traditional social
and political philosophy. Rules and principles have dominated traditional
ethics. Whether agents seek to maximize utility for the aggregate or do their
duty for the sake of duty, they measure their conduct against a set of
universal, abstract, and impersonal norms. Feminist philosophers often call this
traditional view of ethics a “justice” perspective, contrasting it with a
“care” perspective that stresses responsibilities and relationships rather than
rights and rules, and that attends more to a moral situation’s particular
features than to its general implications. Feminist social and political
philosophy focus on the political institutions and social practices that
perpetuate women’s subordination. The goals of feminist social and political
philosophy are 1 to explain why women are suppressed, repressed, and/or
oppressed in ways that men are not; and 2 to suggest morally desirable and
politically feasible ways to give women the same justice, freedom, and equality
that men have. Liberal feminists believe that because women have the same
rights as men do, society must provide women with the same educational and
occupational opportunities that men have. Marxist feminists believe that women
cannot be men’s equals until women enter the work force en masse and domestic
work and child care are socialized. Radical feminists believe that the
fundamental causes of women’s oppression are sexual. It is women’s reproductive
role and/or their sexual role that causes their subordination. Unless women set
their own reproductive goals childlessness is a legitimate alternative to
motherhood and their own sexual agendas lesbianism, autoeroticism, and celibacy
are alternatives to heterosexuality, women will remain less than free.
Psychoanalytic feminists believe that women’s subordination is the result of
earlychildhood experiences that cause them to overdevelop their abilities to
relate to other people on the one hand and to underdevelop their abilities to
assert themselves as autonomous agents on the other. Women’s greatest strength,
a capacity for deep relationships, may also be their greatest weakness: a
tendency to be controlled by the needs and wants of others. Finally,
existentialist feminists claim that the ultimate cause of women’s subordination
is ontological. Women are the Other; men are the Self. Until women define
themselves in terms of themselves, they will continue to be defined in terms of
what they are not: men. Recently, socialist feminists have attempted to weave
these distinctive strands of feminist social and political thought into a
theoretical whole. They argue that women’s condition is overdetermined by the
structures of production, reproduction and sexuality, and the socialization of
children. Women’s status and function in all of these structures must change if
they are to achieve full liberation. Furthermore, women’s psyches must also be
transformed. Only then will women be liberated from the kind of patriarchal
thoughts that undermine their self-concept and make them always the Other.
Interestingly, the socialist feminist effort to establish a specifically
feminist standpoint that represents how women see the world has not gone
without challenge. Postmodern feminists regard this effort as an instantiation
of the kind of typically male thinking that tells only one story about reality,
truth, knowledge, ethics, and politics. For postmodern feminists, such a story
is neither feasible nor desirable. It is not feasible because women’s
experiences differ across class, racial, and cultural lines. It is not
desirable because the “One” and the “True” are philosophical myths that
traditional philosophy uses to silence the voices of the many. Feminist
philosophy must be many and not One because women are many and not One. The
more feminist thoughts, the better. By refusing to center, congeal, and cement
separate thoughts into a unified and inflexible truth, feminist philosophers
can avoid the pitfalls of traditional philosophy. As attractive as the
postmodern feminist approach to philosophy may be, some feminist philosophers
worry that an overemphasis on difference and a rejection of unity may lead to
intellectual as well as political disintegration. If feminist philosophy is to
be without any standpoint whatsoever, it becomes difficult to ground claims
about what is good for women in particufeminist philosophy feminist philosophy
306 306 lar and for human beings in
general. It is a major challenge to contemporary feminist philosophy,
therefore, to reconcile the pressures for diversity and difference with those
for integration and commonality.
genus
generalissimum:
“I love a superlative: good, gooder and goodest, my favourites!” a genus that
is not a species of some higher genus; a broadest natural kind. One of the ten
Aristotelian categories, it is also called summum
genus. For Aristotle and many of his followers, the ten categories (twelve
in Kant, four in Grice) are *not* species of some higher all-inclusive
genus say, being. Otherwise, that alleged
over-arching all-inclusive genus would wholly include the differences, say,
between conversational quality, conversational quantity, conversational
relation, and conversational mode, and would be universally predicable of
conversational quality, conversational quantity, conversational relation, and
conversational mode. But no genus is predicable of its differences in this
manner. Few authors explained this reasoning clearly, but Grice did: “If I
appeal to four conversational categories, I know what I am doing. The principle
of conversational benevolence cannot float in the air: it needs four categories
– informativeness, trustworthiness, connectedness and perspicuity – to make it
applicable to our conversational realities. Grice points out that if the
difference ‘rational’ just meant ‘rational animal’, to define ‘man’ as
‘rational animal’ would be to define him as ‘rational animal animal’, which
would infringe the conversational maxims ‘be brief,’ and ‘do not be repetitive’
– “On toop, man is a rational animal animal is ill formed.” So too generally:
no genus can include its differences in this way. Thus there is no all-inclusive
genus. Grice’s four conversational categories are the most general conversational
genera.
charlier: a. k. a. gerson,
j. de, philosopher. He studied in Paris, and succeeded the nominalist Pierre
d’Ailly as chancellor of the varsity. Both d’Ailly and Gerson played a
prominent part in the work of the Council of Constance. Much of Charlier’s
influence on later thinkers arose from his conciliarism, the view that the
church is a political society and that a general council, acting on behalf of
the church, has the power to depose a pope who fails to promote the church’s
welfare, for it seemed that similar arguments could apply to other forms of
political society. Gerson’s conciliarism was not constitutionalism in the
modern sense, for he appealed to corporate and hierarchical ideas of church
government, and did not rest his case on any principle of individual rights.
His main writings dealt with mystical theology, which, he thought, brings the
believer closer to the beatific vision of God than do other forms of theology.
He was influenced by St. Bonaventure and Albertus Magnus, but especially by
Pseudo-Dionysius, whom he saw as a disciple of St. Paul and not as a Platonist.
He was thus able to adopt an anti-Platonic position in his attacks on the mystic
Ruysbroeck and on contemporary followers of Duns Scotus, such as Jean de Ripa.
In dismissing Scotist realism, he made use of nominalist positions,
particularly those that emphasized divine freedom. He warned theologians
against being misled by pride into supposing that natural reason alone could
solve metaphysical problems; and he emphasized the importance of a priest’s
pastoral duties. Despite his early prominence, he spent the last years of his
life in relative obscurity.
gersonides: a leading
Aristotelian. His oeuvre includes supercommentaries on commentaries on
Aristotle, On the Correct Syllogism, a treatise on the modal syllogism; and a
major Scholastic treatise, The Wars of the Lord. In addition, his biblical
commentaries rank among the best examples of philosophical scriptural exegesis;
especially noteworthy is his interpretation of the Song of Songs as an allegory
describing the ascent of the human intellect to the agent intellect.
Gersonides’ mentors in the Aristotelian tradition were Maimonides and Averroes.
However, more than either of them, Gersonides held philosophical truth and
revealed truth to be coextensive: he acknowledged neither the conflict that
Averroes saw between reason and revelation nor Maimonides’ critical view of the
limitations of the human intellect. Furthermore, while remaining within the
Aristotelian framework, Gersonides was not uncritical of it; his independence
can be illustrated by two of his most distinctive positions. First, against
Maimonides, Gersonides claimed that it is possible to demonstrate both the
falsity of the Aristotelian theory of the eternity of the world Averroes’
position and the absurdity of creation ex nihilo, the traditional rabbinic view
that Maimonides adopted, though for nondemonstrative reasons. Instead
Gersonides advocated the Platonic theory of temporal creation from primordial
matter. Second, unlike Maimonides and Averroes, who both held that the alleged
contradiction between divine foreknowledge of future contingent particulars and
human freedom is spurious, Gersonides took the dilemma to be real. In defense
of human freedom, he then argued that it is logically impossible even for God
to have knowledge of particulars as particulars, since his knowledge is only of
general laws. At the same time, by redefining ‘omniscience’ as knowing
everything that is knowable, he showed that this impossibility is no deficiency
in God’s knowledge. Although Gersonides’ biblical commentaries received wide
immediate acceptance, subsequent medieval Jewish philosophers, e.g., Hasdai
Crescas, by and large reacted negatively to his rigorously rationalistic
positions. Especially with the decline of Aristotelianism within the
philosophical world, both Jewish and Christian, he was either criticized
sharply or simply ignored.
get across – A more colloquial way for what Grice later will have as
‘soul-to-soul-transfer,’ used by Grice in Causal: Surely the truth or falsity
of Strawson having a beautiful handwriting has no bearing on the truth or
falsity of his being hopeless at philosophy (“provided that is what I intended
to get across,” implicating, ‘who cares,’ or ‘whatever’). His cavalier attitude
shows that Grice is never really concerned with the individuation of the
logical form of the implicaturum, just to note that whatever some philosopher
thought was part of the sense it ain’t! This is the Austinian in Grice. Austin
suggested that Grice analysed or consult with Holdcroft for all ‘forms of
indirect communication.’ Grice lists: mean, indicate, suggest, imply,
insinuate, hint – ‘get across’.
geulincx: a. philosopher.
Born in Antwerp, he was educated at Louvain and there became professor of
philosophy and dean. He was forced out of Louvain, perhaps for his Jansenist or
Cartesian tendencies, and in 1658 he moved to Leyden and became a Protestant.
Though he taught there until his death, he never attained a regular
professorship at the varsity. His main philosophical work is his “Ethica; or, De
virtute et primis ejus proprietatibus.” Other oeuvre includes “Questiones
quodlibeticae”; later editions published as “Saturnalia,” a “Logica” 1661, and
a “Methodus inveniendi argumenta,”.”Physica vera,” “Physica peripatetica,”
“Metaphysica vera,” “Metaphysica ad mentem peripateticam,” posthumous
commentaries on Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae. Geulincx was deeply
influenced by Descartes, and had many ideas that closely resemble those of the
later Cartesians as well as those of more independent thinkers like Spinoza and
Leibniz. Though his grounds were original, like many later Cartesians, Geulincx
upholds a version of occasionalism; he argued that someone or something can
only do what it knows how to do (in terms of strict physiological laws). From
this Geulincx infers (“fallaciously,” according to Grice) from that that he
(sc. Geulincx) cannot be the genuine cause of his own bodily movement. In
discussing the mind-body relation, Geulincx used a clock analogy similar to one
Leibniz used in connection with his preestablished harmony. Geulincx also held
a view of mental and material substance reminiscent of that of Spinoza.
Finally, he proposed a system of ethics grounded in the idea of a virtuous
will. As Grice notes: “Despite the evident similarities between Geulincx’s
views and the views of his more renowned contemporaries, it is very difficult
to determine exactly what influence Geulincx may have had on them, and they may
have had on him – but then who gives?”
genovesi: essential
Italian philosopher – Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Genovesi," per
Il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria,
Italia.
genua: essential Italian
philosopher. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, "Grice e Genua," per Il Club
Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
colonna
–
e. giles di roma, ome, original name, a member of the order of the Hermits of
St. Augustine, he studied arts at Augustinian house and theology at the varsity
in Paris 1260 72 but was censured by the theology faculty 1277 and denied a
license to teach as tutor. Owing to the intervention of Pope Honorius IV, he
later returned from Italy to Paris to teach theology, was appointed general of
his order, and became archbishop of Bourges. Colonna both defends and
criticizes views of Aquinas. He held that essence and existence are really
distinct in creatures, but described them as “things”; that prime matter cannot
exist without some substantial form; and, early in his career, that an
eternally created world is possible. He defended only one substantial form in
composites, including man. Grice adds: “Colonna supported Pope Boniface VIII in
his quarrel with Philip IV of France – and that was a bad choice.”
gilson: É., philosopher,
historian, cofounder of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, and a
major figure in Neo-Thomism. Gilson discovered medieval philosophy through his pioneering
work on Descartes’s scholastic background. Gilson argues that early modern
philosophy was incomprehensible without medieval thought, and that medieval
philosophy itself did not represent the unified theory of reality that some
Thomists had supposed. His studies of Duns Scotus, Augustine, Bernard, Aquinas,
Bonaventure, Dante, and Abelard and Héloïse explore this diversity. But in his
Gifford lectures 132, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Gilson attempts a
broad synthesis of medieval teaching on philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and
epistemology, and employed it in his critique of modern philosophy, The Unity
of Philosophical Experience 7. Most of all, Gilson attempted to reestablish
Aquinas’s distinction between essence and existence in created being, as in Being
and Some Philosophers 9.
Gioberti: essential Italian
philosopher, He was imprisoned and exiled for advocating unification, and became a central political
figure during the Risorgimento. His major political oeuvre, “Del primato morale
e civile degli italiani,” argues for a federation of the states. Gioberti’s philosophical theory,
ontologism, in contrast to Hegel’s idealism, identifies the dialectics of Being
with God’s creation. Gioberti condensed his theory in the formula: “Being
creates the existent.” “L’essere crea l’essistente.” The dialectics of Being,
which is the only necessary substance, is a “palingenesis,” or a return to its
origin, in which the existent first departs from and imitates its creator (“mimesis”)
and then returns to its creator (“methexis”). By intuition, the human mind
comes in contact with God and discovers truth by retracing the dialectics of
Being. However, knowledge of supernatural truths is given only by God’s
revelation. His oeuvre also includes “Teorica del soprannaturale” and “Introduzione
allo studio della filosofia.” Gioberti criticized modern philosophers such as
Descartes for their psychologism seeking
truth from the human subject instead of from Being itself and its revelation.
His thought is very influential in Italy. Refs.: Luigi
Speranza, "Grice e Gioberti," per Il Club Anglo-Italiano, The
Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia
giudice: essential Italian philosopher – who
has studied in depth the origin of philosophy in the Eleatic school. Refs.: Luigi
Speranza, "Grice, del Giudice, e la filosofia greco-romana," per il
Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.
datum: in epistemology,
the “brute fact” element to be found or postulated as a component of perceptual
experience. Some theorists who endorse the existence of a given element in
experience think that we can find this element by careful introspection of what
we experience Moore, H. H. Price. Such theorists generally distinguish between
those components of ordinary perceptual awareness that constitute what we
believe or know about the objects we perceive and those components that we
strictly perceive. For example, if we analyze introspectively what we are aware
of when we see an apple we find that what we believe of the apple is that it is
a three-dimensional object with a soft, white interior; what we see of it,
strictly speaking, is just a red-shaped expanse of one of its facing sides.
This latter is what is “given” in the intended sense. Other theorists treat the
given as postulated rather than introspectively found. For example, some
theorists treat cognition as an activity imposing form on some material given
in conscious experience. On this view, often attributed to Kant, the given and
the conceptual are interdefined and logically inseparable. Sometimes this
interdependence is seen as rendering a description of the given as impossible;
in this case the given is said to be ineffable C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order.
On some theories of knowledge foundationalism the first variant of the
given that which is “found” rather than
“postulated” provides the empirical
foundations of what we might know or justifiably believe. Thus, if I believe on
good evidence that there is a red apple in front of me, the evidence is the
non-cognitive part of my perceptual awareness of the red appleshaped expanse.
Epistemologies postulating the first kind of givenness thus require a single
entity-type to explain the sensorial nature of perception and to provide
immediate epistemic foundations for empirical knowledge. This requirement is
now widely regarded as impossible to satisfy; hence Wilfred Sellars describes
the discredited view as the myth of the given.
glanvill: English philosopher
who defended the Royal Society against scholasticism. Glanvill believes that
certainty is possible in the mathematical but not in the empirical realm. In
“The Vanity of Dogmatizing,” he claimed that the human corruption that resulted
from Adam’s fall precludes dogmatic knowledge of nature. Using traditional sceptical
arguments as well as an analysis of causality that anticipate Hume, Glanvill
argues that empirical belief is the probabilistic variety acquired by piece-meal
investigation. Despite his scepticism he argues for the existence of witches in
Witches and Witchcraft (“Probably he was married to one,” Grice comments).
gnosticism:
a philosophical
movement, especially important under the leadership of Valentinus and
Basilides. They teach that matter was evil, the result of a cosmic disruption
in which an evil archon often associated with the god of the Old Testament,
Yahweh rebelled against the heavenly pleroma the complete spiritual world. In
the process divine sparks were unleashed from the pleroma and lodged in
material human bodies. Jesus was a high-ranking archon Logos sent to restore
those souls with divine sparks to the pleroma by imparting esoteric knowledge
gnosis to them. Gnosticism influenced and threatened the orthodox church from
within and without. NonChristian gnostic sects rivaled Christianity, and
Christian gnostics threatened orthodoxy by emphasizing salvation by knowledge
rather than by faith. Theologians like Clement of Alexandria and his pupil
Origen held that there were two roads to salvation, the way of faith for the
masses and the way of esoteric or mystical knowledge for the philosophers.
Gnosticism profoundly influenced the C. of E., causing it to define its
scriptural canon and to develop a set of creeds and an episcopal organization
(“My mother, Mabel Fenton Grice, was a bit of a gnostic, if I must say” –
Grice).
göckel: goclenius r.,
philosopher, after holding some minor posts elsewhere, he becomes professor at
Marburg. “Though he was well read and knowledgeable of later trends in these
disciplines,” Grice ntoes, “you could clearly see his basic sympathies
areAristotelian.” Goclenius was very well regarded by his contemporaries, who
called him “Plato marburgensis,” the Christian Aristotle, and “TheLight of
Europe,” among other things. Göckel published an unusually large number of
essays, including “Psychologia, hoc est de hominis perfection,” “Conciliator
philosophicus,” “Controversiae logicae et philosophicae,” and numerous other
works on logic, rhetoric, physics, metaphysics, and the Latin language. But his
most lasting work is his “Lexicon Philosophicum” – “very practical,” Grice
notes, “since the entries are alphabetically ordered.” -- together with its
companion, the “Lexicon Philosophicum Graecum” – “I gave a copy to Urmson,”
Grice recalls, “and the next day he was writing the “Greek Philosopical
Lexicon.” Göckel’s “Lexicon philosophicum” provides pretty obscure definitions
of the philosophical terminology of late Scholastic philosophy, and “they are
deemed so obscure that he is banned from quotation at some varsities.” – Grice.
gödel: cited by Grice.
His incompleteness theorems, two theorems formulated and proved by the Austrian
logician Kurt Gödel in his infamous “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Whiteheads und Russells ‘Principia
Mathematica’ und vervandter Systeme I,” probably the most celebrated results in
the whole of logic. They are aptly referred to as “incompleteness” theorems
since each shows, for any member of a certain class of formal systems, that there
is a sentence formulable in its language that it cannot prove, but that it
would be desirable for it to prove. In the case of the first theorem G1, what
cannot be proved is a true sentence of the language of the given theory. G1 is
thus a disappointment to any theory constructor who wants his theory to tell
the whole truth about its subject. In the case of the second theorem G2, what
cannot be proved is a sentence of the theory that “expresses” its consistency.
G2 is thus a disappointment to those who desire a straightforward execution of
Hilbert’s Program. The proofs of the incompleteness theorems can be seen as
based on three main ideas. The first is that of a Gödel numbering, i.e., an
assignment of natural numbers to each of the various objects i.e., the terms,
formulas, axioms, proofs, etc. belonging to the various syntactical categories
of the given formal system T referred to here as the “represented theory” whose
metamathematics is under consideration. The second is that of a
representational scheme. This includes i the use of the Gödel numbering to
develop number-theoretic codifications of various of the metamathematical
properties pertaining to the represented theory, and ii the selection of a
theory S hereafter, the “representing theory” and a family of formulas from
that theory the “representing formulas” in terms of which to register as
theorems various of the facts concerning the metamathematical properties of the
represented theory thus encoded. The basic result of this representational scheme
is the weak representation of the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of T, where
a set L of numbers is said to be weakly represented in S by a formula ‘Lx’ of S
just in case for every number n, n1 L if and only if ‘L[n]’ is a theorem of S,
where ‘[n]’ is the standard term of S that, under the intended interpretation
of S, designates the number n. Since the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of
the represented theory T will typically be recursively enumerable, and the
representing theory S must be capable of weakly representing this set, the
basic strength requirement on S is that it be capable of weakly representing
the recursively enumerable sets of natural numbers. Because basic systems of
arithmetic e.g. Robinson’s arithmetic and Peano arithmetic all have this
capacity, Gödel’s theorems are often stated using containment of a fragment of
arithmetic as the basic strength requirement governing the capacities of the
representing theory which, of course, is also often the represented theory.
More on this point below. The third main idea behind the incompleteness
theorems is that of a diagonal or fixed point construction within S for the
notion of unprovability-in-T; i.e., the formulation of a sentence Gödel of S
which, under the given Gödel numbering of T, the given representation of T’s
metamathematical notions in S, and the intended interpretation of the language
of S, says of itself that it is not provable-in-T. Gödel is thus false if
provable and unprovable if true. More specifically, if ‘ProvTx’ is a formula of
S that weakly represents the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of T in S, then
Gödel can be any formula of S that is provably equivalent in S to the formula
‘- ProvT [Gödel]’. Given this background, G1 can be stated as follows: If a the
representing theory S is any subtheory of the represented theory T up to and
God Gödel’s incompleteness theorems 347
347 including the represented theory itself, b the representing theory S
is consistent, c the formula ‘ProvT x’ weakly represents the set of Gödel
numbers of theorems of the represented theory T in the representing theory S,
and d Gödel is any sentence provably equivalent in the representing theory S to
‘ProvT [Gödel]’, then neither Gödel nor -Gödel is a theorem of the representing
theory S. The proof proceeds in two parts. In the first part it is shown that,
for any representing theory S up to and including the case where S % T , if S
is consistent, then -Gödel is not a theorem of S. To obtain this in its
strongest form, we pick the strongest subtheory S of T possible, namely S % T,
and construct a reductio. Thus, suppose that 1 -Gödel is a theorem of T. From 1
and d it follows that 2 ‘ProvT[Gödel]’ is a theorem of T. And from 2 and c in
the “if” direction it follows that 3 Gödel is a theorem of T. But 1 and 3
together imply that the representing theory T is inconsistent. Hence, if T is
consistent, -Gödel cannot be a theorem of T. In the second part of the proof it
is argued that if the representing theory S is consistent, then Gödel is not a
theorem of it. Again, to obtain the strongest result, we let S be the strongest
subtheory of T possible namely T itself and, as before, argue by reductio. Thus
we suppose that A Gödel is a theorem of S % T . From this assumption and
condition d it follows that B ‘-Provr [Gödel]’ is a theorem of S % T . By A and
c in the “only if” direction it follows that C ‘ProvT [Gödel]’ is a theorem of
S % T . But from B and C it follows that S % T
is inconsistent. Hence, Gödel is not provable in any consistent
representing theory S up to and including T itself. The above statement of G1
is, of course, not the usual one. The usual statement suppresses the
distinction stressed above between the representing and represented theories
and collaterally replaces our condition c with a clause to the effect that T is
a recursively axiomatizable extension of some suitably weak system of
arithmetic e.g. Robinson’s arithmetic, primitive recursive arithmetic, or Peano
arithmetic. This puts into a single clause what, metamathematically speaking,
are two separate conditions one
pertaining to the representing theory, the other to the represented theory. The
requirement that T be an extension of the selected weak arithmetic addresses
the question of T’s adequacy as a representing theory, since the crucial fact
about extensions of the weak arithmetic chosen is that they are capable of
weakly representing all recursively enumerable sets. This constraint on T’s
capabilities as a representing theory is in partnership with the usual
requirement that, in its capacity as a represented theory, T be recursively
axiomatizable. For T’s recursive axiomatizability ensures under ordinary
choices of logic for T that its set of
theorems will be recursively enumerable
and hence weakly representable in the kind of representing theory that
it itself by virtue of its being an extension of the weak arithmetic specified
is. G1 can, however, be extended to certain theories whose sets of Gödel
numbers of theorems are not recursively enumerable. When this is done, the
basic capacity required of the representing theory is no longer merely that the
recursively enumerable sets of natural numbers be representable in it, but that
it also be capable of representing various non-recursively enumerable sets, and
hence that it go beyond the weak arithmetics mentioned earlier. G2 is a more
demanding result that G1 in that it puts significantly stronger demands on the
formula ‘ProvT x’ used to express the notion of provability for the represented
theory T. In proving G1 all that is required of ‘ProvT x’ is that it weakly
represent θ % the set of Gödel numbers of theorems of T; i.e., that it yield an
extensionally accurate registry of the theorems of the represented theory in
the representing theory. G2 places additional conditions on ‘ProvT x’;
conditions which result from the fact that, to prove G2, we must codify the
second part of the proof of G1 in T itself. To do this, ‘ProvT x’ must be a
provability predicate for T. That is, it must satisfy the following
constraints, commonly referred to as the Derivability Conditions for ‘ProvT x’:
I If A is a theorem of the represented theory, then ‘ProvT [A]’ must be a
theorem of the representing theory. II Every instance of the formula ‘ProvT [A
P B] P ProvT [A] P ProvT [B]’ must be a theorem of T. III Every instance of the
formula ‘ProvT [A] P ProvT [ProvT [A]]’ must be a theorem of T. I, of course,
is just part of the requirement that ‘ProvT [A]’ weakly represent T’s
theoremset in T. So it does not go beyond what is required for the proof of G1.
II and III, however, do. They make it possible to “formalize” the second part
of the proof of G1 in T itself. II captures, in terms of ‘ProvT X’, the modus
ponens inference by which B is derived from A, and III codiGödel’s
incompleteness theorems Gödel’s incompleteness theorems 348 348 fies in T the appeal to c used in
deriving C from A. The result of this “formalization” process is a proof within
T of the formula ‘ConT P Gödel’ where ConT is a formula of the form ‘- ProvT
[#]’, with ‘ProvT x’ a provability predicate for T and ‘[#]’ the standard
numeral denoting the Gödel number # of some formula refutable in T . From this,
and the proof of the second part of G1 itself in which the first Derivability
Condition, which is just the “only if” direction of c, figures prominently, we
arrive at the following result, which is a generalized form of G2: If S is any
consistent representing theory up to and including the represented theory T
itself, ‘ProvT x’ any provability predicate for T, and ConT any formula of T of
the form ‘- ProvT [#]’, then ConT is not a theorem of S. To the extent that, in
being a provability predicate for T, ‘ProvT x’ “expresses” the notion of
provability of the represented theory T, it seems fair to say that ConT
expresses its consistency. And to the extent that this is true, it is sensible
to read G2 as saying that for any representing theory S and any represented
theory T extending S, if S is consistent, then the consistency of T is not
provable in S.
fontaines: g. philosopher.
He taught at Paris. Among his major writings are fifteen Quodlibetal Questions
and other disputations. He was strongly Aristotelian in philosophy, with
Neoplatonic influences in metaphysics. Fontaines defends the identity of
essence and existence in creatures against theories of their real or intentional
distinction, and argues for the possibility of demonstrating God’s existence
and of some quidditative knowledge of God. He admits divine ideas for species
but not for individuals within species. He makes wide applications (“and
misapplications,” Grice adds) of Aristotelian act-potency theory e.g., to the distinction between the soul and
its powers (this is discussed by Grice in “The power structure of the soul”),
to the explanation of intellection and volition, to the general theory of
substance and accident, and in unusual fashion to essence-existence
“composition” of creatures.
godwin: w. English
philosopher. “An Enquiry concerning Political Justice” arises heated debate.
Godwin argues for radical forms of determinism, anarchism, and utilitarianism. Godwin
thought that government corrupts everyone by encouraging stereotyped thinking
that prevents us from seeing each other as unique individuals. His “Caleb
Williams” portrays a good man corrupted by prejudice. Once we remove prejudice
and artificial inequality we will see that our acts are wholly determined. This
obviously makes punishment pointless. Only in a small anarchic society – such
as the one he observed outside Oxford -- can people see others as they really
are and thus come to feel a ‘sympathetic concern’ for his well-being. (In this
he influenced Edward Carpenter of “England Arise” infame). Only so can we be
virtuous, because being virtuous is acting from a ‘sympathetic’ (cf. Grice’s
principle of conversational sympathy) feeling to bring the greatest happiness
to the dyad affected. Godwin takes this principle (relabeled “the principle of
conversational sympathy” by Grice) quite literally, and accepts all its
consequences. Truthfulness has no claim on us other than the happiness it
brings. If keeping a promise causes less good than breaking it, there is no
reason (or duty) at all to keep it. If one must choose between saving the life
either of a major human benefactor or of one’s distant uncle, one must choose
the benefactor. We surely need no ‘rules’ in morals. An alleged ‘moral’ “rule”
would prevent us from seeing others properly, thereby impairing the sympathetic
feeling that constitutes virtue. Rights, too, are pointless. Sympathetic people
will act to help (or cooperate with) others. Later utilitarians like Bentham
had difficulty in separating their positions from Godwin’s notorious
views. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Godwin and
the ethics of conversation.’
Kennst
du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluhn?: j.
w. v. Goethe, a ballad from Mignon that Goethe uses in Book II of his novel,
The apprentice. Grice was amused by Searle’s example – “even if it misses its
point!” An British soldier in the Second World War is captured by Italian
troops. The British soldier wishes to get the Italian troops to believe that he
is a *German* officer, in order to get them to release him. What he would like
to do is to tell them, in German, or Italian, that he is a German officer
(“Sono tedesco,” “Ich bin Deutsche”) but he does not know enough German, or
Italian, to do such a simple thing as that. So he, as it were, attempts to put
on a show of telling them that he is a German officer by reciting the only line
of German that he knows, a line he learned at Clifton, to wit: ‘Kennst du das
Land, wo die Zitronen bluhen?”. The British soldier intends to produce a
certain response in his Italian captors, viz. that they should believe him to
be a German officer. He intends to produce this response by means of the
Italian troops’s recognition of his intention to produce it. Nevertheless, it
would seem false that when the British soldier utters, "Kennst du das
Land, wo die Zitronen bluhen?” what he means or communicates is that he is a German officer. Searle thinks he can support
a claim that something is missing from Grice’s account of meaning. This would
(Grice think Searle thinks) be improved if it were supplemented as follows
(Grice’s conjecture): "U meant that p by x" means " U intended
to produce in A a certain effect by means of the recognition of U's intention
to produce that effect, and (if the utterance of x is the utterance of a
sentence) U intends A's recognition of U's intention (to produce the effect) to
be achieved by means of the recognition that the sentence uttered is
conventionally used to produce such an effect." Now even if Grice should
be faced with a genuine counterexample, he should be very reluctant to take the
way out which Grice suspects is being offered him. Grice finds it difficult to
tell whether this is what was being offered, since Searle is primarily
concerned with the characterization of something different, not with a general
discussion of the nature of meaning or communication. On top he is seems mainly
concerned to adapt Grice’s account of meaning to a dissimilar purpose, and
hardly, as Schiffer at least tried, to amend Grice’s analysis so as to be better
suited to its avowed end. Of course Grice would not want to deny that when the
vehicle of meaning is a sentence (or the utterance of a sentence, as in “Mary
had a little lamb” – uttered by a German officer in France to have the French
believe that he is an English officer) the utterer’s intentions are to be
recognized, in the normal case, by virtue of a knowledge of the conventional
use of the sentence (indeed Grice’s account of “conversational” or in general "non-conventional
implicaturum" depends, in some cases, on something like this idea). But
Grice treats meaning something by the utterance of a sentence as being only a
SPECIAL case of meaning or communicating that p by an utterance (in Grice’s
extended use of ‘utterance’ to include gestures and stuff), and to treat a
‘conventional’ co-relation between a sentence and a specific response as
providing only one of the ways (or modes) in which an utterance may be
correlated with a response. Is Searle’s “Kennst du das land, wo die Zitronen
bluhen?” however, a genuine counterexample? It seems to Grice that the
imaginary situation is under-described, and that there are perhaps three different
cases to be considered. First, the situation might be such that the only real
chance that the Italian soldiers would, on hearing the British soldier recite
the line from Goethe suppose him to be a German officer, would be if the Italians
were to, as they should not, argue as follows: "The British soldier has
just recited the first line from Goethe’s “Faust,” in a surprisingly
authoritative tone); He thinks we are silly enough to think he is, with the
British uniform and all, a German soldier.” If the situation was such that the
Italian soldier were likely to argue like that, and the British soldier knew
that to be so, it would be difficult to avoid attributing to him the intention,
when he recited the line from “Fuast”, that they should argue like that. One
cannot in general intend that some result should be achieved, if one knows that
there is no likelihood that it will be achieved. But if the British soldier’s
intention is as just described, he certainly would not, by Grice’s account, be
meaning that he is a German soldier.
For though he would intend the Italian soldier to believe him to be a German
soldier, he would not be intending the Italian soldier to believe this on the
basis of the Italian soldier’s recognition of his intention. And it seems to
Grice that though this is not how Searle wishes the example to be taken, it
would be much the most likely situation to have obtained. Second, Grice thinks
that Searle wants us to suppose that the British soldier hopes that the Italian
soldier will each a belief that the English soldier is a German soldier via a
belief that the line from Goethe which he uttered means other than what it
does, for why would they NOT know the land where the lemon trees bloom? They
are in it! It s not easy to see how to build up the context of utterance so as
to give the English soldier any basis for his hope that the Italian soldier
thinks that the English soldier thinks that the Italian soldier knows where the
lemon trees bloom – his native land! Now it becomes doubtful whether, after
all, it is right to say that the English solidier did not mean (unsuccessfully
communicate) that he is a German
soldier. Communication is not factive. That Geothe’s line translates as "Knowest
thou the land where the lemon trees bloom" is totally irrelevant. If the
English soldier could be said to have meant or communicated that he was a German soldier, he would
have meant that by saying the line, or by saying the line in a particularly
authoritative way. It makes a difference whether U merely intends A to think
that a particular sentence has a certain meaning which it does not in fact
have, or whether he also intends him to think of himself as supposed to make
use of his (mistaken) thought that, metabolically, the expression has this ‘meaning’
in reaching a belief about U's intentions. If A is intended to think that U
expects A to understand the sentence spoken and is intended to attribute to it,
metabolically, a ‘meaning’ which U knows it does not have, he utterer should
not be described as meaning, by his utterance, that p. Grice does not see the
force of this contention, nor indeed does he find it easy or conceptually clear
to apply the distinction which it attempts to make. The general point seems to
be as follows. Characteristically, an utterer intends his recipient to
recognize (and to think himself intended to recognize) some "crucial"
feature F, and to think of F (and to think himself intended to think of F) as
co-related in a certain way or mode with some response which the utterer
intends the audience to produce. It does not matter so far as the attribution
of the utterer’s meaning is concerned, whether F is thought by U to be *really*
co-related in that way or mode with the response or not; though of course in
the normal case U will think F to be so co-related. Suppose, however, we fill
in the detail of the English soldier case, so as to suppose he accompanies
"Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluhen" with gesticulations,
chest-thumping, and so forth; he might then hope to succeed in conveying to the
Italian soldier that he intends them to understand what the line ‘means’, to
learn from the particular German sentence that the English soldier intends them
to think that he is a German officer (whereas really of course the English
soldier does not expect them to learn that way, but only by assuming, on the
basis of the situation and the character of the English soldier’s performance,
that he must be trying to communicate to them, against all reasonable hopes, that he is a German officer. Perhaps in
that case, we should be disinclined to say that the English soldier means or
communicates that he is a German
officer, and ready to say only that the English soldier means, naturally and
metabolically, as it were, the Italian solider to think that he was a
German officer. Grice goes on to suggest a revised set of conditions for "
U meant something by x" (Redefinition III, Version A): Ranges of
variables: A: audiences f: features of utterance r: responses c: modes of
correlation (for example, iconic, associative, conventional) I63 H. P. GRICE (HA)
(if) (3r) (ic): U uttered x intending (i) A to think x possessesf (2) A to
think U intends (i) (3) A to think off as correlated in way c with the type to
which r belongs (4) A to think U intends (3) (5) A to think on the basis of the
fulfillment of (i) and (3) that U intends A to produce r (6) A, on the basis of
fulfillment of (5), to produce r (7) A to think U intends (6). In the case of
the "little girl" there is a single feature f (that of being an
utterance of a particular French sentence) with respect to which A has all the
first four intentions. (The only thing wrong is that this feature is not in
fact correlated conventionally with the intended responses, and this does not
disqualify the utterance from being one by which U means something.) In the English
soldier case there is no such single feature. The Italian soldier is intended
(i) to recognize, and go by, feature f1 (x's being a bit of German and being
uttered with certain gesticulations, and so. forth) but (2) to think that he is
intended to recognize x as havingf2 (as being a particular German sentence). So
intention (2) on our revised list is absent. And so we do not need the
condition previously added to eliminate this example. I think, however, that
condition (7) (the old condition [i]) is still needed, unless it can be
replaced by a general "anti-deception" clause. It may be that such
replacement is possible; it may be that the "backward-looking"
subclauses (2), (4), and (7) can be omitted, and replaced by the prohibitive
clause which figures in Redefinition II, Version B. We have then to consider
the merits of Redefinition III, Version B, the definiens of which will run as
follows: (3A) (if) (3r) (ic): (a) U uttered x intending (I) A to think x
possessesf (2) A to thinkf correlated in way c with the type to which r belongs
(3) A to think, on the basis of the fulfillment of (I) and (3) that U intends A
to produce r (4) A, on the basis of the fulfillment of (3) to produce r, and
(b) there is no inference-element E such that U intends both (I') A in his
determination of r to rely on E (2') A to think Uto intend (I') to be false. Grice
would actually often play and sing the ballad. G. writer often considered the
leading cultural figure of his age. He wrote lyric poetry, dramas, and
fictional, essayistic, and aphoristic prose as well as works in various natural
sciences, including anatomy, botany, and optics. A lawyer by training, for most
of his life Goethe was a government official at the provincial court of
Saxony-Weimar. In his numerous contributions to world literature, such as the
novels The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship,
Elective Affinities, and Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Pilgrimage, and the two-part
tragedy Faust, Goethe represented the tensions between individual and society
as well as between culture and nature, with increased recognition of their
tragic opposition and the need to cultivate a resigned self-discipline in
artistic and social matters. In his poetic and scientific treatment of nature
he was influenced by Spinoza’s pantheist identification of nature and God and
maintained that everything in nature is animate and expressive of divine
presence. In his theory and practice of science he opposed the quantitative and
experimental method and insisted on a description of the phenomena that was to
include the intuitive grasp of the archetypal forms or shapes underlying all
development in nature.
tipperary: music-hall cited
by Grice. Grice liked the song and would often accompany himself at the piano
(“in Eb always”). He especially loved to recite the three verses (“Up to
mighty London came an Irishman one day,”
“Paddy wrote a letter to his Irish Molly-O,” and “Molly wrote a neat reply to
Irish Paddy-O”). Grice devises a possible counter-example to his account of
‘communication,’ or strictly the conditions that have to be met for the state
of affairs “Emisor E communicates that p” to hold. In Grice’s scenario, a
reminiscence shared by his father, at a musical soirée in 1912,
at Harborne, Grice’s grandfather sings "Tipperary” “in a
raucous voice” (those are Grice’s father’s words) with the intention of getting
his mother-in-law (whom he knew was never too keen on the music-hall) to leave
the drawing-room. Grice’s grandfather’s mother-in-law is supposed to recognise
(and to know that she is intended to recognise) that Grice’s grandfather wants
to get rid of his mother in law – “to put it bluntly,” as Grice’s father has
it. Grice’s grandfather, moreover, intends that his mother-in-law shall, in the
event, leave because she recognizes Grice’s grandfather’s intention that
she shall go. Grice’s grandfather’s
scheme is that his mother-in-law should, somewhat wrongly, think that Grice’s
grandfather intends his mother-in-law to think that he intends to get rid of
her by means of the recognition of his intention that she should go. In other
words, the mother-in-law is supposed to argue: "My son-in-law intends me
to *think* that he intends to get rid of me by the raucous singing of that
awful ditty complete with the three verses – starting with “Up to mighty London
came an Irishman one day” -- but of course he, rude as he is, really wants to
get rid of me by means of the recognition of his intention to get rid of me. I
am really intended to go because he wants me to go, not because I cannot stand
the singing – I suppose. I mean, I could possibly stand it, if tied up, or
something." The fact that the mother in law, while thinking she is seeing
through his son-in-law’s plans, is really *conforming* to them (a situation that
would not hold if she is known by her son-in-law to be ‘counter-suggestible’),
is suggested as precluding Grice from deeming, here, that his grandfather means
by the singing in a raucuous voice the opening line to “Tipperary” in a
raucuous voice (“Up to mighty London came an Irishman one day”) that his
mother-in-law should go. However, it is clear to Grice that, once one tries to
fill in the detail of this description, the example becomes baffling – “even if
I myself designed it.” “For, how is my grandfather’s mother-in-law sposed to
reach the idea that my grandfather wants her to think that he intends to get
rid of her by singing in a raucuous voice “Up to mighty London came an Irishman
one day”?” “My father tells me that my grandfather sould sing in a *particular
nasal tone*, so common at the music-hall, which he knows *not* necessarily to
be displeasing to his mother in law (when put to use to a respectable
drawing-room ballad), though it is to most people that visit the Grices.”
Grice’s grandfather’s mother in law knows that Grice’s grandfather knows this
particular nasa tone not to be displeasing to her, but she thinks, rather
wrongly, that Grice’s grandfaather does not know that his mother-in-law knows
this (she would never display his tastes in public). The mother-in-law might
then be supposed to argue: "My son-in-law cannot want to drive me out of
the drawing-room by his singing, awful to most, since he knows that that
particularly nasal tone is not really displeasing to me. My son-in-law,
however, does not know that I know he knows this. Therefore, maybe my
son-in-law is does wantsme to think that he intends to drive me out, on the
ground of a mere cause, rather than a reason, *by* his singing." “At this
point,” Grice notes, “one would expect my grandfather’s mother-in-law to be completely
at a loss to explain my grandfather’s performance.” “I see no reason at all why
my grandfather’s mother in-law should then suppose that he *really* wants to
get rid of her in some other way.” Whether or not this example could be made to
work, its complexity is ennerving. “And the sad thing about it, is that any
attempt on my part to introduce yet further restrictions would involve more
ennerving complexities still.” “It is in general true that one cannot have
intentions to achieve results which one sees no chance of achieving; and the
success of intentions of the kind involved in communication requires he to whom
communications or near-communications is addressed to be capable in the
circumstances of having certain thoughts and drawing certain conclusions.” At
some early stage in the attempted regression the calculations required of my
grandfather’s mother-in-lawy by my grandfather will be impracticably difficult;
and I suspect the limit has now been reached (if not exceeded).” “So my
grandfather, is he is a Grice, cannot have the intentions – as reconstructed by
my father, this was way back in 1912 -- required of him in order to force the
addition of further restrictions. Not only are the calculations my grandfather would
be requiring of his mother-in-law too difficult, but it would be impossible for
him to find cues to indicate to her that the calculations should be made, even
if they were within his mother-in-law’s compass. So one is tempted to conclude
that no regress is involved.” But even should this conclusion be correct, we
seem to be left with an uncomfortable situation. For though we may know that we
do not need an infinite series of backward-looking sub-clauses, we cannot say
just how many such sub-clauses are required. “Indeed, it looks as if the
definitional expansion of "By uttering x emisor E communicates that p" might have to vary from
case to case, depending on such things as the nature of the intended response,
the circumstances in which the attempt to elicit the response is made (say, a
musical soirée at Harborne in mid-1912), and the intelligence of the utterer (in
this case my grandfather) and of the addressee (his mother in law).” It is
dubious whether such variation can be acceptable. However, Grice genially finds
out that this ennerving difficulty (of the type some of Grice’s tutees trying
to outshine him would display) is avoided if we could eliminate potential
counter-examples not by requiring the emisor to have certain additional,
backward-looking, intentions, but rather by requiring the emisor *not* to have
a certain sort of intention or complex of intentions. Potential counterexamples
of the kind involves the construction of a situation in which the emisor E
intends the sendee S, in the reflection process by which the sendee S is
supposed to reach his response, both to rely on some inference-element, i. e., ome
premise or some inferential step, E, and also to think that the emisor E
intends his sendee S not to rely on E. “What I propose, then, is to uproot such
potential counterexamples by a single clause which prohibits the emisor from
having this kind of complex intention.” We reach a redefinition: "the
emisor E means that p by uttering x" is true iff (for some sendee S and
for some response r): (a) the emisor U utters x intending (i) the sendee to
produce r (2) the sendee S to think the
emisor E to intend (i) (3) the sendee S’s fulfillment of (i) to be based on the
sendee S’s fulfillment of (2) (b) there is no inference-element E such that the
emsior E utters x intending both (i') that the sendee S’s determination of r
should rely on the inference element e and (2') that the sendee S should think
the emisor E to intend that (I') be false.”
goldman: “literally, man
of gold” – Grice. philosopher who has made notable contributions to action
theory, naturalistic and social epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive
science. He has persistently urged the relevance of cognitive and social
science to problems in epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and
ethics. A Theory of Human Action proposes a Griceian causal theory of action,
describes the generative structure of basic and non-basic action, and argues
for the compatibility of free will and determinism. In “Epistemics: The
Regulative Theory of Cognition” 8, he argued that traditional epistemology
should be replaced by ‘epistemics’, which differs from traditional epistemology
in characterizing knowledge, justified belief, and rational belief in light of
empirical cognitive science. Traditional epistemology has used a coarse-grained
notion of belief, taken too restrictive a view of cognitive methods, offered
advice for ideal cognizers rather than for human beings with limited cognitive
resources, and ignored flaws in our cognitive system that must be recognized if
cognition is to be improved. Epistemologists must attend to the results of
cognitive science if they are to remedy these deficiencies in traditional
epistemology. Goldman later developed epistemics in Epistemology and Cognition
6, in which he developed a historical, reliabilist theory of knowledge and
epistemic justification and employed empirical cognitive science to
characterize knowledge, evaluate skepticism, and assess human cognitive
resources. In Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences and
in Knowledge in a Social World 9, he defended and elaborated a veritistic i.e.,
truth-oriented evaluation of communal beliefprofiles, social institutions, and
social practices e.g., the practice of restricting evidence admissible in a
jury trial. He has opposed the widely accepted view that mental states are
functional states “The Psychology of Folk Psychology,” Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 3 and defended a simulation theory of mental state attribution, on
which one attributes mental states to another by imagining what mental state
one would be in if one were in the other’s situation “In Defense of the
Simulation Theory,” 2. He has also argued that cognitive science bears on
ethics by providing information relevant to the nature of moral evaluation,
moral choice, and hedonic states associated with the good e.g., happiness “Ethics
and Cognitive Science,” 3.
bonum: good-making
characteristic, a characteristic that makes whatever is intrinsically or
inherently good, good. Hedonists hold that pleasure and conducing to pleasure
are the sole good-making characteristics. Pluralists hold that those
characteristics are only some among many other goodmaking characteristics,
which include, for instance, knowledge, friendship, beauty, and acting from a
sense of duty. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “E. F. Carritt on an alleged ambiguity of
‘good.’”
goodman: n. very New-World
philosopher who made seminal contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, and
aesthetics. Like Quine, Goodman repudiates analyticity and kindred notions.
Goodman’s work can be read as a series of investigations into how to do
philosophy without them. A central concern is how symbols structure facts and
our understanding of them. The Structure of Appearance 2 presents Goodman’s
constructionalism. Pretheoretical beliefs are vague and mutually inconsistent.
By devising an interpreted formal system that derives them from or explicates
them in terms of suitable primitives, we bring them into logical contact,
eliminate inconsistencies, and disclose unanticipated logical and theoretical
connections. Multiple, divergent systems do justice to the same pretheoretical
beliefs. All systems satisfying our criteria of adequacy are equally
acceptable. Nothing favors any one of them over the others. Ways of Worldmaking
8 provides a less formal treatment of the same themes. Category schemes dictate
criteria of identity for their objects. So mutually irreducible category
schemes do not treat of the same things. Since a world consists of the things
it comprises, irreducible schemes mark out different worlds. There are, Goodman
concludes, many worlds if any. Inasmuch as the categories that define identity onditions
on objects are human constructs, we make worlds. Languages of Art 8 argues that
art, like science, makes and reveals worlds. Aesthetics is the branch of
epistemology that investigates art’s cognitive functions. Goodman analyzes the
syntactic and semantic structures of symbol systems, both literal and
figurative, and shows how they advance understanding in art and elsewhere.
Fact, Fiction, and Forecast4 poses the new riddle of induction. An item is grue
if and only if it is examined before future time t and found to be green or is
not so examined and is blue. All hitherto examined emeralds are both green and
grue. What justifies our expecting future emeralds to be green, not grue?
Inductive validity, the riddle demonstrates, depends on the characterization as
well as the classification of the evidence class. ‘Green’ is preferable, Goodman
maintains, because it is entrenched in inductive practice. This does not
guarantee that inferences using ‘green’ will yield truths. Nothing guarantees
that. But entrenched predicates are pragmatically advantageous, because they
mesh with our habits of thought and other cognitive resources. Goodman’s other
works include Problems and Projects 2, Of Mind and Other Matters 4, and
Reconceptions 8, written with Catherine Z. Elgin.
gorgias: Grecian Sophist –
“never to be confused with a philosopher even if they were oh-so-much cleverer
than your average one!” – Grice. A teacher of rhetoric from Leontini in
Syracuse, Gorgias came to Athens as an ambassador from his city and caused a
sensation with his artful oratory. He is known through references and short quotations
in later writers, and through a few surviving texts two speeches and a philosophical treatise. He
taught a rhetorical style much imitated in antiquity, by delivering model
speeches to paying audiences. Unlike other Sophists he did not give formal instruction
in other topics, nor prepare a formal rhetorical manual. He was known to have
had views on language, on the nature of reality, and on virtue. Gorgias’s style
was remarkable for its use of poetic devices such as rhyme, meter, and elegant
words, as well as for its dependence on artificial parallelism and balanced
antithesis. His surviving speeches, defenses of Helen and Palamedes, display a
range of arguments that rely heavily on what the ancients called eikos
‘likelihood’ or ‘probability’. Gorgias maintained in his “Helen” that a speech
can compel its audience to action; elsewhere he remarked that in the theater it
is wiser to be deceived than not. Gorgias’s short book On Nature or On What Is
Not survives in two paraphrases, one by Sextus Empiricus and the other now
considered more reliable in an Aristotelian work, On Melissus, Xenophanes, and
Gorgias. Gorgias argued for three theses: that nothing exists; that even if it
did, it could not be known; and that even if it could be known, it could not be
communicated. Although this may be in part a parody, most scholars now take it
to be a serious philosophical argument in its own right. In ethics, Plato
reports that Gorgias thought there were different virtues for men and for
women, a thesis Aristotle defends in the Politics.
gracian: theorist of
the baroque. Born in Belmonte, he
entered the Jesuit order in 1619 and became rector of the Jesuit at Tarragona and a favorite of King Philip
III. Gracián’s most important works are Agudeza y arte de ingenio “The Art of
Worldly Wisdom,” 164248 and El criticón “The Critic,” 165157. The first
provides philosophical support for conceptismo, a literary movement that sought to create new
concepts through the development of an elaborate style, characterized by subtlety
agudeza and ingenious literary artifices. El criticón, written in the
conceptist style, is a philosophical novel that pessimistically criticizes the
evils of civilization. Gracián anticipates Rousseau’s noble savage in claiming
that, although human beings are fundamentally good in the state of nature, they
are corrupted by civilization. Echoing a common theme of thought at the time, he attributes the
nefarious influence of civilization to the confusion it creates between
appearance and reality. But Gracián’s pessimism is tempered by faith: man has
hope in the afterlife, when reality is finally revealed. Gracián wrote several
other influential books. In El héroe “The Hero,” 1637 and El político “The
Politician,” 1640, he follows Machiavelli in discussing the attributes of the
ideal prince; El discreto “The Man of Discretion,” 1646 explores the ideal
gentleman, as judged by society. Most of
Gracián’s books were published under pseudonyms to avoid censure by his order.
Gorgias Gracián y Morales, Baltasar 351
351 Among authors outside Spain who used his ideas are Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer, Voltaire, and Rousseau.
grammaticum: Is there a ‘grammar’ of gestures? How loose can an Oxonian
use ‘grammar’? Sometimes geography, sometimes botany – “Grammatica” the Romans
never cared to translate. Although ‘literature’ is the cognate. – For some
reasons, the Greeks were obsessed with the alphabet – It was a trivial ‘art’. Like
‘logic,’ and philosophy is NOT an art or ‘techne.’ A philosopher is not a
technician – and hardly an artist like William Morris (his ‘arts and crafts’ is
a joke since it translates in Latin to ‘ars et ars,’ and ‘techne kai techne’).
The sad thing is that at MIT, as Grice knew, Chomsky is appointed professor of
philosophy, and he mainly writes about ‘grammar’! Later, Chomsky tries to get
more philosophical, but chooses the wrong paradigm – Cartesianism, the ghost in
the machine, in Ryle’s parlance. Odly, Oxonians, who rarely go to grammar
schools, see ‘grammar’ as a divinity, and talk of the logical grammar of a
Ryleian agitation, say. It sounds high class because there is the irony that an
Oxonian philosopher is surely not a common-or-garden grammarian, involved in
the grammar of, say, “Die Deutsche Sprache.” The Oxonian is into the logical
grammar. It is more of a ‘linguistic turn’ expression than the duller
‘conceptual analysis,’ or ‘linguistic philosophy.’ cf. logical form, and
Russell, “grammar is a pretty good guide to logical form.” while philosophers
would use grammar jocularly, Chomsky didnt. The problem, as Grice notes, is
that Chomsky never tells us where grammar ends (“or begins for that matter.”)
“Consider the P, karulising elatically.” When Carnap introduces the P, he talks
syntax, not grammar. But philosophers always took semiotics more seriously than
others. So Carnap is well aware of Morriss triad of the syntactics, the
semantics, and the pragmatics. Philosophers always disliked grammar, because
back in the days of Aelfric, philosophia was supposed to embrace dialectica and
grammatica, and rhetorica. “It is all part of philosophy.” Truth-conditional
semantics and implicatura. grammar, a system of rules specifying a language. The
term has often been used synonymously with ‘syntax’, the principles governing
the construction of sentences from words perhaps also including the systems of
word derivation and inflection case
markings, verbal tense markers, and the like. In modern linguistic usage the
term more often encompasses other components of the language system such as
phonology and semantics as well as syntax. Traditional grammars that we may
have encountered in our school days, e.g., the grammars of Latin or English,
were typically fragmentary and often prescriptive basically a selective catalog of forms and
sentence patterns, together with constructions to be avoided. Contemporary
linguistic grammars, on the other hand, aim to be descriptive, and even
explanatory, i.e., embedded within a general theory that offers principled
reasons for why natural languages are the way they are. This is in accord with
the generally accepted view of linguistics as a science that regards human
language as a natural phenomenon to be understood, just as physicists attempt
to make sense of the world of physical objects. Since the publication of
Syntactic Structures 7 and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax 5 by Noam Chomsky,
grammars have been almost universally conceived of as generative devices, i.e.,
precisely formulated deductive systems
commonly called generative grammars
specifying all and only the well-formed sentences of a language together
with a specification of their relevant structural properties. On this view, a
grammar of English has the character of a theory of the English language, with
the grammatical sentences and their structures as its theorems and the grammar
rules playing the role of the rules of inference. Like any empirical theory, it
is subject to disconfirmation if its predictions do not agree with the
facts if, e.g., the grammar implies that
‘white or snow the is’ is a wellformed sentence or that ‘The snow is white’ is
not. The object of this theory construction is to model the system of knowledge
possessed by those who are able to speak and understand an unlimited number of
novel sentences of the language specified. Thus, a grammar in this sense is a
psychological entity a component of the
human mind and the task of linguistics
avowedly a mentalistic discipline is to determine exactly of what this knowledge
consists. Like other mental phenomena, it is not observable directly but only
through its effects. Thus, underlying linguistic competence is to be
distinguished from actual linguistic performance, which forms part of the
evidence for the former but is not necessarily an accurate reflection of it,
containing, as it does, errors, false starts, etc. A central problem is how
this competence arises in the individual, i.e., how a grammar is inferred by a
child on the basis of a finite, variable, and imperfect sample of utterances
encountered in the course of normal development. Many sorts of observations
strongly suggest that grammars are not constructed de novo entirely on the
basis of experience, and the view is widely held that the child brings to the
task a significant, genetically determined predisposition to construct grammars
according to a well-defined pattern. If this is so, and since apparently no one
language has an advantage over any other in the learning process, this inborn
component of linguistic competence can be correctly termed a universal grammar.
It represents whatever the grammars of all natural languages, actual or
potential, necessarily have in common because of the innate linguistic
competence of human beings. The apparent diversity of natural languages has
often led to a serious underestimation of the scope of universal grammar. One
of the most influential proposals concerning the nature of universal grammar
was Chomsky’s theory of transformational grammar. In this framework the
syntactic structure of a sentence is given not by a single object e.g., a parse
tree, as in phrase structure grammar, but rather by a sequence of trees
connected by operations called transformations. The initial tree in such a
sequence is specified generated by a phrase structure grammar, together with a
lexicon, and is known as the deep structure. The final tree in the sequence,
the surface structure, contains the morphemes meaningful units of the sentence
in the order in which they are written or pronounced. For example, the English
sentences ‘John hit the ball’ and its passive counterpart ‘The ball was hit by
John’ might be derived from the same deep structure in this case a tree looking
very much like the surface structure for the active sentence except that the
optional transformational rule of passivization has been applied in the derivation
of the latter sentence. This rule rearranges the constituents of the tree in
such a way that, among other changes, the direct object ‘the ball’ in deep
structure becomes the surface-structure subject of the passive sentence. It is
thus an important feature of this theory that grammatical grammar grammar
352 352 relations such as subject,
object, etc., of a sentence are not absolute but are relative to the level of
structure. This accounts for the fact that many sentences that appear
superficially similar in structure e.g., ‘John is easy to please’, ‘John is
eager to please’ are nonetheless perceived as having different underlying
deep-structure grammatical relations. Indeed, it was argued that any theory of
grammar that failed to make a deep-structure/surface-structure distinction
could not be adequate. Contemporary linguistic theories have, nonetheless,
tended toward minimizing the importance of the transformational rules with
corresponding elaboration of the role of the lexicon and the principles that
govern the operation of grammars generally. Theories such as generalized
phrase-structure grammar and lexical function grammar postulate no
transformational rules at all and capture the relatedness of pairs such as
active and passive sentences in other ways. Chomsky’s principles and parameters
approach 1 reduces the transformational component to a single general movement
operation that is controlled by the simultaneous interaction of a number of
principles or subtheories: binding, government, control, etc. The universal
component of the grammar is thus enlarged and the contribution of
languagespecific rules is correspondingly diminished. Proponents point to the
advantages this would allow in language acquisition. Presumably a considerable
portion of the task of grammar construction would consist merely in setting the
values of a small number of parameters that could be readily determined on the
basis of a small number of instances of grammatical sentences. A rather
different approach that has been influential has arisen from the work of
Richard Montague, who applied to natural languages the same techniques of model
theory developed for logical languages such as the predicate calculus. This
so-called Montague grammar uses a categorial grammar as its syntactic component.
In this form of grammar, complex lexical and phrasal categories can be of the
form A/B. Typically such categories combine by a kind of “cancellation” rule:
A/B ! B P A something of category A/B combines with something of category B to
yield something of category A. In addition, there is a close correspondence
between the syntactic category of an expression and its semantic type; e.g.,
common nouns such as ‘book’ and ‘girl’ are of type e/t, and their semantic
values are functions from individuals entities, or e-type things to
truth-values T-type things, or equivalently, sets of individuals. The result is
an explicit, interlocking syntax and semantics specifying not only the
syntactic structure of grammatical sentences but also their truth conditions.
Montague’s work was embedded in his own view of universal grammar, which has
not, by and large, proven persuasive to linguists. A great deal of attention
has been given in recent years to merging the undoubted virtues of Montague
grammar with a linguistically more palatable view of universal grammar. Refs.:
One source is an essay on ‘grammar’ in the H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
gramsci: a. political
leader whose imprisonment by the Fascists for his involvement with the Communist Party had the ironical result of
sparing him from Stalinism and enabling him to better articulate his distinctive
political philosophy. He welcomes the Bolshevik Revolution as a “revolution
against Capital” rather than against capitalism: as a revolution refuting the
deterministic Marxism according to which socialism could arise only by the
gradual evolution of capitalism, and confirming the possibility of the radical
transformation of social institutions. In 1 he supported creation of the Communist Party; as its general secretary
from 4, he tried to reorganize it along more democratic lines. In 6 the
Fascists outlawed all opposition parties. Gramsci spent the rest of his life in
various prisons, where he wrote more than a thousand s of notes ranging from a
few lines to chapterlength essays. These Prison Notebooks pose a major
interpretive challenge, but they reveal a keen, insightful, and open mind
grappling with important social and political problems. The most common
interpretation stems from Palmiro Togliatti, Gramsci’s successor as leader of
grammar, categorial Gramsci, Antonio 353
353 the Communists. After the
fall of Fascism and the end of World War II, Togliatti read into Gramsci the
so-called road to socialism: a strategy
for attaining the traditional Marxist goals of the classless society and the
nationalization of the means of production by cultural means, such as education
and persuasion. In contrast to Bolshevism, one had to first conquer social
institutions, and then their control would yield the desired economic and
political changes. This democratic theory of Marxist revolution was long
regarded by many as especially relevant to Western industrial societies, and so
for this and other reasons Gramsci is a key figure of Western Marxism. The same
theory is often called Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, referring to a
relationship between two political units where one dominates the other with the
consent of that other. This interpretation was a political reconstruction,
based primarily on Gramsci’s Communist involvement and on highly selective
passages from the Notebooks. It was also based on exaggerating the influence on
Gramsci of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gentile, and minimizing influences like
Croce, Mosca, Machiavelli, and Hegel. No new consensus has emerged yet; it would
have to be based on analytical and historical spadework barely begun. One main
interpretive issue is whether Gramsci, besides questioning the means, was also
led to question the ends of traditional Marxism. In one view, his commitment to
rational persuasion, political realism, methodological fallibilism, democracy,
and pluralism is much deeper than his inclinations toward the classless
society, the abolition of private property, the bureaucratically centralized
party, and the like; in particular, his pluralism is an aspect of his
commitment to the dialectic as a way of thinking, a concept he adapted from
Hegel through Croce.
green: t. h., absolute idealist and social philosopher. The
son of a clergyman, Green studied and taught at Oxford. His central concern was
to resolve what he saw as the spiritual crisis of his age by analyzing
knowledge and morality in ways inspired by Kant and Hegel. In his lengthy
introduction to Hume’s Treatise, he argued that Hume had shown knowledge and
morality to be impossible on empiricist principles. In his major work, “Prolegomena
to Ethics,” Green contended that thought imposed relations on sensory feelings
and impulses whose source was an eternal consciousness to constitute objects of
knowledge and of desire. Furthermore, in acting on desires, rational agents
seek the satisfaction of a self that is realized through their own actions.
This requires rational agents to live in harmony among themselves and hence to
act morally. In Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation Green
transformed classical liberalism by arguing that even though the state has no
intrinsic value, its intervention in society is necessary to provide the
conditions that enable rational beings to achieve self-satisfaction.
gregorius: I, Saint, called
Gregory the Great c.540604, a pope and Roman political leader. Born a
patrician, he was educated for public office and became prefect of Rome in 570.
In 579, he was appointed papal representative in Constantinople, returning to
Rome as counselor to Pope Pelagius II in 586. He was elected Pope Gregory I in
590. When the Lombards attacked Rome in 594, Gregory bought them off.
Constantinople would neither cede nor defend Italy, and Gregory stepped in as
secular ruler of what became the Papal States. He asserted the universal
jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome, and claimed patriarchy of the West. His
writings include important letters; the Moralia, an exposition of the Book of
Job summarizing Christian theology; Pastoral Care, which defined the duties of
the clergy for the Middle Ages; and Dialogues, which deals chiefly with the
immortality of the soul, holding it could enter heaven immediately without
awaiting the Last Judgment. His thought, largely Augustinian, is unoriginal,
but was much quoted in the Middle Ages.
gregory
of
Nyssa, Saint, Grecian theologian and mystic who tried to reconcile Platonism
with Christianity. As bishop of Cappadocia in eastern Asia Minor, he championed
orthodoxy and was prominent at the First Council of Constantinople. He related
the doctrine of the Trinity to Plato’s ideas of the One and the Many. He
followed Origen in believing that man’s material great chain of being Gregory
of Nyssa 354 354 nature was due to the
fall and in believing in the Apocatastasis, the universal restoration of all
souls, including Satan’s, in the kingdom of God.
rimini: gregorio di,
philosopher, he studied in Italy, England, and France, and taught at the
universities of Bologna, Padua, Perugia, and Paris before becoming prior
general of the Hermits of St. Augustine in his native city of Rimini, about
eighteen months before he died. Gregory earned the honorific title “the
Authentic Doctor” because he was considered by many of his contemporaries to be
a faithful interpreter of Augustine, and thus a defender of tradition, in the
midst of the scepticism of Occam and his disciples regarding what could be
known in natural philosophy and theology. Thus, in his commentary on Books I
and II of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Gregory rejected the view that because of
God’s omnipotence he can do anything and is therefore unknowable in his nature
and his ways. Gregory also maintained that after Adam’s fall from
righteousness, men need, in conjunction with their free will, God’s help grace
to perform morally good actions. In non-religious matters Gregory is usually
associated with the theory of the complexe significabile, according to which
the object of knowledge acquired by scientific proof is neither an object
existing outside the mind, nor a word simplex or a proposition complexum, but
rather the complexe significabile, that which is totally and adequately
signified by the proposition expressed in the conclusion of the proof in
question.
grice: as a count noun –
“Lots of grice in the fields.” – One Scots to another -- count noun, a noun
that can occur syntactically a with quantifiers ‘each’, ‘every’, ‘many’, ‘few’,
‘several’, and numerals; b with the indefinite article, ‘an’; and c in the
plural form. The following are examples of count nouns CNs, paired with semantically
similar mass nouns MNs: ‘each dollar / silver’, ‘one composition / music’, ‘a
bed / furniture’, ‘instructions / advice’. MNs but not CNs can occur with the
quantifiers ‘much’ and ‘little’: ‘much poetry / poems’, ‘little bread / loaf’.
Both CNs and MNs may occur with ‘all’, ‘most’, and ‘some’. Semantically, CNs
but not MNs refer distributively, providing a counting criterion. It makes
sense to ask how many CNs?: ‘How many coins / gold?’ MNs but not CNs refer
collectively. It makes sense to ask how much MN?: ‘How much gold / coins?’ One
problem is that these syntactic and semantic criteria yield different
classifications; another problem is to provide logical forms and truth
conditions for sentences containing mass nouns.
grice: English philosopher, born in
Harborne, “in the middle of nowhere,” as Strawson put it – (“He was from
London, Strawson was”) -- whose work concerns perception and philosophy of
language, and whose most influential contribution is the concept of a
conversational implicaturum and the associated theoretical machinery of
conversational ‘postulates.’ The concept of a conversational implicaturum is
first used in his ‘presentation’ on the causal theory of perception and
reference. Grice distinguishes between the ‘meaning’ of the words used in a
sentence and what is implied by the utterer’s choice of words. If someone says
“It looks as if there is a red pillar box in front of me,” the choice of words
implies that there is some doubt about the pillar box being red. But, Grice
argues, that is a matter of word choice and the sentence itself does not
‘impl’ that there is doubt. The term
‘conversational implicaturum’ was introduced in Grice’s William James lectures
published in 8 and used to defend the use of the material implication as a logical
translation of ‘if’. With Strawson “In Defence of Dogma”, Grice gives a
spirited defense of the analyticsynthetic distinction against Quine’s
criticisms. In subsequent systematic papers Grice attempts, among other things,
to give a theoretical grounding of the distinction. Grice’s oeuvre is part of
the Oxford ordinary language tradition, if formal and theoretical. He also
explores metaphysics, especially the concept of absolute value. There is the H.
P. Grice Society – Other organisations Grice-related are “The Grice Club,” “The
Grice Circle,” and “H. P. Grice’s Playgroup.”
H. P.
Grice’s playgroup:
after the death of J. L. Austin, Grice kept the routine of the Saturday morning
with a few new rules. 1. Freedom. 2. Freedom, and 3. Freedom.
Griceian. Grice disliked
the spelling “Gricean” that some people in the New World use. “Surely my
grandmother was right when she said she had become a Griceian by marrying a
Grice!”
Brown, S. author of the
Dictionary of British Philosophers (“I first thought of writing a dictionary of
English philosophers, but then I thought that Russell would be out – he was
born in Wales!.”
grice: g. r. – Welsh
philosopher who taught at Norwich. Since H. P. Grice and G. R. Grice both wrote
on the contract and morality, one has to be careful.
gricese: While Grice presented Gricese as refutation of Vitters’s
idea of a private language “I soon found out that my wife and my two children
were speaking Gricese, as was my brother Derek!” -- english, being
English or the genius of the ordinary. H. P. Grice refers to “The English
tongue.” A refusal to rise above the facts of ordinary life is characteristic
of classical Eng. Phil. from
Ireland-born Berkeley to Scotland-born Hume, Scotland-born Reid, and very
English Jeremy Bentham and New-World Phil. , whether in transcendentalism
Emerson, Thoreau or in pragmatism from James to Rorty. But this orientation did
not become truly explicit until after the linguistic turn carried out by
Vienna-born Witters, translated by C. K. Ogden, very English Brighton-born
Ryle, and especially J. L. Austin and his best companion at the Play Group, H.
P. Grice, when it was radicalized and systematized under the name of a phrase
Grice lauged at: “‘ordinary’-language philosophy.” This preponderant recourse to
the ordinary seems inseparable from certain peculiar characteristics of the
English Midlanders such as H. P. Grice, such as the gerund that often make it
difficult if not impossible to translate. It is all the more important to
emphasize this paradox because English Midlander philosopher, such as H. P.
Grice, claims to be as simple as it is universal, and it established itself as
an important philosophical language in the second half of the twentieth
century, due mainly to the efforts of H. P. Grice. English, but especially
Oxonian Phil. has a specific
relationship to ‘ordinary’ language (even though for Grice, “Greek and Latin
were always more ordinary to me – and people who came to read Eng. at Oxford
were laughed at!”), as well as to the requirements of everyday life, that is
not limited to the theories of the Phil.
of language, in which an Eng. philosopher such as H. P. Grice appears as
a pioneer. It rejects the artificial linguistic constructions of philosophical
speculation that is, Met. and always prefers to return to its original home, as
Witters puts it: the natural environment of everyday words Philosophical
Investigations. Thus we can discern a continuity between the recourse to the
ordinary in Scots Hume, Irish Berkeley, Scots Reid, and very English Jeremy
Bentham and what will become in Irish London-born G. E. Moore and Witters after
he started using English, at least orally and then J. L. Austin’s and H. P.
Grice’s ‘ordinary’-language philosophy. This continuity can be seen in several
areas. First, in the exploitation of all the resources of the language, which
is considered as a source of information and is valid in itself. Second, in the
attention given to the specificities—and even the defects, or ‘implicatura,’ as
Grice calls them —of the vernacular --
which become so many philosophical characteristics from which one can
learn. Finally, in the affirmation of the naturalness of the distinctions made
in and by ordinary language, seeking to challenge the superiority of the
technical language of Philosophy —the former being the object of an agreement
deeper than the latter. Then there’s The Variety of Modes of Action. The
passive. There are several modes of agency, and these constitute both part of
the genius of the language and a main source of its problems in tr.. Agency is
a strange intersection of points of view that makes it possible to designate
the person who is acting while at the same time concealing the actor behind the
act—and thus locating agency in the passive subject itself v. AGENCY. A classic
difficulty is illustrated by the following sentence from J. Stuart Mill’s To
gauge the naturalness of the passive construction in English, it suffices to
examine a couple of newspaper headlines. “Killer’s Car Found” On a retrouvé la
voiture du tueur, “Kennedy Jr. Feared Dead.” On craint la mort du fils Kennedy;
or the titles of a philosophical essay, “Epistemology Naturalized,”
L’Épistémologie naturalisée; Tr. J.
Largeault as L’Épistémologie devenue naturelle; a famous article by Quine that
was the origin of the naturalistic turn in American Phil. and “Consciousness Explained” La conscience
expliquée by Daniel Dennett. We might then better understand why this PASSIVE
VOICE kind of construction—which seems so awkward in Fr. compared with the active voice— is perceived
by its Eng. users as a more direct and effective way of speaking. More
generally, the ellipsis of the agent seems to be a tendency of Eng. so profound
that one can maintain that the phenomenon Lucien Tesnière called diathèse récessive
the loss of the agent has become a characteristic of the Eng. language itself,
and not only of the passive. Thus, e. g. , a Fr. reader irresistibly gains the impression that
a reflexive pronoun is lacking in the following expressions. “This book reads well.”
ce livre se lit agréablement. “His poems do not translate well.” ses poèmes se
traduisent difficilement. “The door opens.” la porte s’ouvre. “The man will
hang.” l’homme sera pendu. In reality, here again, Eng. simply does not need to
mark by means of the reflexive pronoun se the presence of an active agent. Do,
make, have Eng. has several terms to translate the single Fr. word faire, which it can render by to do, to
make, or to have, depending on the type of agency required by the context.
Because of its attenuation of the meaning of action, its value as emphasis and
repetition, the verb “to do” has become omnipresent in English, and it plays a
particularly important role in philosophical texts. We can find a couple of
examples of tr. problems in the Oxonian seminars by J. L. Austin. In Sense and
Considerations on Representative Government: “I must not be understood to say
that” p. To translate such a passive construction, Fr. is forced to resort to the impersonal pronoun
on and to put it in the position of an observer of the “I” je as if it were
considered from the outside: On ne doit pas comprendre que je dis que p. But at
the same time, the network of relations internal to the sentence is modified,
and the meaning transformed. Necessity is no longer associated with the subject
of the sentence and the author; it is made impersonal. Philosophical language
also makes frequent use of the diverse characteristics of the passive. Here we
can mention the crucial turning point in the history of linguistics represented
by Chomsky’s discovery Syntactic Structures,
of the paradigm of the active/ passive relation, which proves the
necessity of the transformational component in grammar. A passive utterance is
not always a reversal of the active and only rarely describes an undergoing, as
is shown by the example She was offered a bunch of flowers. In particular,
language makes use of the fact that this kind of construction authorizes the
ellipsis of the agent as is shown by the common expression Eng. spoken. For a
philosopher, the passive is thus the privileged form of an action when its
agent is unknown, indeterminate, unimportant, or, inversely, too obvious. Thus
without making his prose too turgid, in Sense and Sensibilia Austin can use
five passives in less than a page, and these can be translated in Fr. only by on, an indeterminate subject defined
as differentiated from moi. “It is clearly implied, that “Now this, at least if
it is taken to mean The expression is here put forward We are given, as
examples, familiar objects The expression is not further defined On sous-entend
clairement que Quant à cela, du moins si on l’entend au sens de On avance ici
l’expression On nous donne, comme exemples, des objets familiers On
n’approfondit pas la définition de l’expression . . . 1 Langage, langue,
parole: A virtual distinction. Contrary to what is too often believed, the Eng.
language does not conflate under the term language what Fr. distinguishes following Saussure with the terms
langage, langue, and parole. In reality, Eng. also has a series of three terms
whose semantic distribution makes possible exactly the same trichotomy as Fr. :
First there’s Grice’s “tongue,”which serves to designate a specific language by
opposition to another; speech, which refers more specifically to parole but
which is often translated in Fr. by
discours; and language in the sense of faculté de langage. Nonetheless, Fr. ’s
set of systematic distinctions can only remain fundamentally virtual in English,
notably because the latter refuses to radically detach langue from parole. Thus
in Chrestomathia, Bentham uses “tongue” (Bentham’s tongue – in Chrestomathia)
and language interchangeably and sometimes uses language in the sense of
langue: “Of all known languages the Grecian [Griceian] is assuredly, in its
structure, the most plastic and most manageable. Bentham even uses speech and
language as equivalents, since he speaks of parts of speech. But on the
contrary, he sometimes emphasizes differences that he ignores here. And he
proceeds exactly like Hume in his essay Of the Standard of Taste, where we
find, e. g. , But it must also be allowed, that some part of the seeming
harmony in morals may be accounted for from the very nature of language. The
word, virtue, with its equivalent in every tongue, implies praise; as that of
vice does blame. REFS.: Bentham, Jeremy. ChrestomathiEd. by M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston. Oxford:
Clarendon, . Hume, D. . Of the Standard of Taste. In Four Dissertations.
London: Thoemmes Continuum, . First published in 175 Saussure, F. de. Course in
General Linguistics. Ed. by Bally and
Sechehaye. Tr. R. Harris. LaSalle, IL:
Open Court, . First published in circulation among these forms. This formal
continuity promotes a great methodological inventiveness through the interplay
among the various grammatical entities that it enables. The gerund: The form of -ing that is the most
difficult to translate Eng. is a nominalizing language. Any verb can be
nominalized, and this ability gives the Eng. philosophical language great creative
power. “Nominalization,” as Grice calls it, is in fact a substantivization
without substantivization: the verb is not substantivized in order to refer to
action, to make it an object of discourse which is possible in any language,
notably in philosophical Fr. and G. ,
but rather to nominalize the verb while at the same time preserving its quality
as a verb, and even to nominalize whole clauses. Fr. can, of course, nominalize faire, toucher,
and sentir le faire, le toucher, even le sentir, and one can do the same, in a
still more systematic manner, in G. . However, these forms will not have the
naturalness of the Eng. expressions: the making and unmaking the doing and
undoing, the feeling, the feeling Byzantine, the meaning. Above all, in these
languages it is hard to construct expressions parallel to, e. g. , the making
of, the making use of, my doing wrongly, “my meaning this,” (SIGNIFICATUM,
COMMUNICATUM), his feeling pain, etc., that is, mixtures of noun and verb
having—and this is the grammatical characteristic of the gerund — the external
distribution of a nominal expression and the internal distribution of a verbal
expression. These forms are so common that they characterize, in addition to a
large proportion of book titles e. g. , The Making of the Eng. Working Class,
by E. P. Thomson; or, in Phil. , The Taming of Chance, or The taming of the
true, by I. Hacking, the language of classical Eng. Phil. . The gerund
functions as a sort of general equivalent or exchanger between grammatical
forms. In that way, it not only makes the language dynamic by introducing into
it a permanent temporal flux, but also helps create, in the language itself, a
kind of indeterminacy in the way it is parsed, which the translator finds
awkward when he understands the message without being able to retain its
lightness. Thus, in A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume speaks, regarding the
idea, of the manner of its being conceived, which a Fr. translator might render as sa façon d’être conçue
or perhaps, la façon dont il lui appartient d’être conçue, which is not quite
the same thing. And we v. agency and the gerund connected in a language like
that of Bentham, who minimizes the gaps between subject and object, verb and
noun: much regret has been suggested at the thoughts of its never having yet
been brought within the reach of the Eng. reader ChrestomathiTranslators often
feel obliged to render the act expressed by a gerund by the expression le fait
de, but this has a meaning almost contrary to the English. With its gerund, Eng.
avoids the discourse of fact by retaining only the event and arguing only on
that basis. The inevitable confusion suggested by Fr. when it translates the Eng. gerund is all the
more unfortunate in this case because it becomes impossible to distinguish when
Eng. uses the fact or the case from when it uses the gerund. The importance of
the event, along with the distinction between trial, case, and event, on the
one hand and happening on the other, is Sensibilia, he has criticized the claim
that we never perceive objects directly and is preparing to criticize its
negation as well: I am not going to maintain that we ought to embrace the
doctrine that we do perceive material things. Je ne vais pas soutenir que nous
devons embrasser la doctrine selon laquelle nous percevons vraiment les choses
matérielles. Finally, let us recall Austin’s first example of the performative,
which plays simultaneously on the anaphoric value of do and on its sense of
action, a duality that v.ms to be at the origin of the theory of the
performative, I do take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife—as uttered in
the course of the marriage ceremony Oui à savoir: je prends cette femme pour
épouse’énoncé lors d’une cérémonie de mariage; How to Do Things with Words. On
the other hand, whereas faire is colored by a causative sense, Eng. uses to
make and to have—He made Mary open her bags il lui fit ouvrir sa valise; He had
Mary pour him a drink il se fit verser un verre—with this difference: that make
can indicate, as we v., coercion, whereas have presupposes that there is no
resistance, a difference that Fr. can
only leave implicit or explain by awkward periphrases. Twentieth-century Eng.
philosophers from Austin to Geach and Anscombe have examined these differences
and their philosophical implications very closely. Thus, in A Plea for Excuses,
Austin emphasizes the elusive meaning of the expression doing something, and
the correlative difficulty of determining the limits of the concept of
action—Is to sneeze to do an action? There is indeed a vague and comforting
idea that doing an action must come down to the making of physical movements.
Further, we need to ask what is the detail of the complicated internal
machinery we use in acting. Philosophical Papers No matter how partial they may
be, these opening remarks show that there is a specific, intimate relation
between ordinary language and philosophical language in English language Phil.
. This enables us to better understand why the most Oxonian philosophers are so
comfortable resorting to idiomatic expressions cf. H. Putnam and even to
clearly popular usage: “Meanings ain’t in the head.” It ain’t necessarily so.As
for the title of Manx-ancestry Quine’s famous book From a Logical Point of
View, which at first seems austere, it is taken from a calypso song: “From a
logical point of view, Always marry women uglier than you. The Operator -ing:
Properties and Antimetaphysical Consequences -ing: A multifunctional operator
Although grammarians think it important to distinguish among the forms of -ing—present
participles, adjectives, the progressive, and the gerund—what strikes the
reader of scientific and philosophical texts is first of all the free in Phil.
, You are v.ing something Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, regarding a stick in
water; I really am perceiving the familiar objects Ayer, Foundations of
Empirical Knowledge. The passage to the form be + verb + -ing indicates, then,
not the progressiveness of the action but rather the transition into the
metalanguage peculiar to the philosophical description of phenomena of
perception. The sole exception is, curiously, to know, which is practically
never used in the progressive: even if we explore the philosophical and
epistemological literature, we do not find “I am knowing” or he was knowing, as
if knowledge could not be conceived as a process. In English, there is a great
variety of what are customarily called aspects, through which the status of the
action is marked and differentiated in a more systematic way than in Fr. or G. , once again because of the -ing
ending: he is working / he works / he worked / he has been working. Unlike what
happens in Slavic languages, aspect is marked at the outset not by a duality of
verbal forms but instead by the use of the verb to be with a verb ending in
-ing imperfect or progressive, by opposition to the simple present or past
perfect. Moreover, Grice mixes several aspects in a single expression:
iterativity, progressivity, completion, as in it cannot fail to have been
noticed Austin, How to Do Things. These are nuances, or implicate, as Labov and
then Pinker recently observed, that are not peculiar to classical or written
Eng. but also exist in certain vernaculars that appear to be familiar or
allegedly ungrammatical. The vernacular seems particularly sophisticated on
this point, distinguishing “he be working” from “he working” —that is, between
having a regular job and being engaged in working at a particular moment,
standard usage being limited to “he is working” Pinker, Language Instinct.
Whether or not the notion of aspect is used, it seems clear that in Eng. there
is a particularly subtle distinction between the different degrees of
completion, of the iterativity or development of an action, that leads Oxonian
philosophers to pay more attention to these questions and even to surprising
inventions, such as that of ‘implicaturum,’ or ‘visum,’ or ‘disimplicaturum.’
The linguistic dissolution of the idea of substance Fictive entities Thus the verb + -ing
operation simply gives the verb the temporary status of a noun while at the
same time preserving some of its syntactic and semantic properties as a verb,
that is, by avoiding substantivization. It is no accident that the
substantiality of the I think asserted by Descartes was opposed by virtually
all the Eng. philosophers of the seventeenth century. If a personal identity
can be constituted by the making our distant perceptions influence each other,
and by giving us a present concern for our past or future pains or pleasures
Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, it does not require positing a substance: the
substantivization of making and giving meets the need. We can also consider the
way in which Russell Analysis of Matter, ch.27 makes his reader understand far
more easily than does Bachelard, and without having to resort to the category
of an epistemological obstacle, that one can perfectly well posit an atom as a
series of events without according it the status of a substance. crucial in
discussions of probability. The very definition of probability with which Bayes
operates in An Essay towards Solving a Problem, the first great treatise on
subjective probability, is based on this status of the happening, the event
conceived not in terms of its realization or accomplishment but in terms of its
expectation: The probability of any event is the ratio between the value at
which an expectation depending on the happening of the event ought to be
computed, and the value of the thing expected upon its happening. The progressive: Tense and aspect If we now
pass from the gerund to the progressive, another construction that uses -ing, a
new kind of problem appears: that of the aspect and temporality of actions. An
interesting case of tr. difficulty is, e. g. , the one posed by Austin
precisely when he attempts, in his presentation of performatives, to
distinguish between the sentence and the act of saying it, between statement
and utterance: there are utterances, such as the uttering of the sentence is,
or is part of, the doing of an action How to Do Things. The tr. difficulty here
is caused by the combination in the construction in -ing of the syntactical
flexibility of the gerund and a progressive meaning. Does the -ing construction
indicate the act, or the progressiveness of the act? Similarly, it is hard to
choose to translate “On Referring” P. F. Strawson as De la référence rather
than as De l’action de référer. Should one translate On Denoting Russell as De
la dénotation the usual tr. or as Du dénoter? The progressive in the strict
sense—be + verb + -ing— indicates an action at a specific moment, when it has
already begun but is not yet finished. A little farther on, Austin allows us to
gauge the ease of Eng. in the whole of these operations. “To utter the sentence
is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be
doing. The Fr. tr. gives, correctly:
Énoncer la phrase, ce n’est pas décrire ce qu’il faut bien reconnaître que je
suis en train de faire en parlant ainsi, but this remains unsatisfying at best,
because of the awkwardness of en train de. Moreover, in many cases, en train de
is simply not suitable insofar as the -ing does not indicate duration: e. g. ,
in At last I am v.ing . It is interesting to examine from this point of view
the famous category of verbs of perception, verbum percipiendi. It is remarkable
that these verbs v., hear can be in some cases used with the construction be +
verb + -ing, since it is generally said even in grammar books that they can be
used only in the present or simple past and not in the progressive. This rule
probably is thought to be connected with something like the immediacy of
perception, and it can be compared with the fact that the verbs to know and to
understand are also almost always in the present or the simple past, as if the
operations of the understanding could not be presented in the progressive form
and were by definition instantaneous; or as if, on the contrary, they
transcended the course of time. In reality, there are counterexamples. “I don’t
know if I’m understanding you correctly”; You are hearing voices; and often
Oxonian Phil. , which makes their tr. particularly indigestible, especially in
Fr. , where -ismes gives a very Scholastic feel to the classifications
translated. In addition to the famous term realism, which has been the object
of so many contradictory definitions and so many debates over past decades that
it has been almost emptied of meaning, we may mention some common but
particularly obscure for anyone not familiar with the theoretical context
terms: “cognitivism,” noncognitivism, coherentism, eliminativism,
consequentialism, connectionism, etSuch terms in which moral Phil. is particularly fertile are in general
transposed into Fr. without change in a
sort of new, international philosophical language that has almost forgone tr..
More generally, in Eng. as in G. , words can be composed by joining two other
words far more easily than in Fr. —without specifying the logical connections
between the terms: toothbrush, pickpocket, lowlife, knownothing; or, for more
philosophical terms: aspect-blind, language-dependent, rule-following,
meaning-holism, observer-relative, which are translatable, of course, but not
without considerable awkwardness.
Oxonian philosophese. Oxonian
Phil. seems to establish a language that
is stylistically neutral and appears to be transparently translatable. Certain
specific problems—the tr. of compound words and constructions that are more
flexible in Eng. and omnipresent in current philosophical discourse, such as
the thesis that la thèse selon laquelle, the question whether la question de
savoir si, and my saying that le fait que je dise que—make Fr. tr.s of contemporary Eng. philosophical texts
very awkward, even when the author writes in a neutral, commonplace style.
Instead, these difficulties, along with the ease of construction peculiar to
English, tend to encourage non-Oxonian analytical philosophers to write
directly in Gricese, following the example of many of their European
colleagues, or else to make use of a technical vernacular we have noted the
-isms and compounds that is frequently heavy going and not very inventive when
transRomang terms which are usually transliterated. This situation is certainly
attributable to the paradoxical character of Gricese, which established itself
as a philosophical language in the second half of the twentieth century: it is
a language that is apparently simple and accessible and that thus claims a kind
of universality but that is structured, both linguistically and
philosophically, around major stumbling blocks to do, -ing, etthat often make
it untranslatable. It is paradoxically this untranslatability, and not its
pseudo-transparency, that plays a crucial role in the process of
universalization. . IThe Austinian Paradigm: Ordinary Language and Phil. The proximity of ordinary language and
philosophical language, which is rooted in classical English-language Phil. ,
was theorized in the twentieth century by Austin and can be summed up in the
expression “‘ordinary’-language philosophy”. Ordinary language Phil. is interested This sort of overall
preeminence in Eng. of the verbal and the subjective over the nominal and the
objective is clear in the difference in the logic that governs the discourse of
affectivity in Fr. and in English. How would
something that one is correspond to something that one has, as in the case of
fear in Fr. avoir peur? It follows that
a Fr. man—who takes it for granted that fear is something that one feels or
senses—cannot feel at home with the difference that Eng. naturally makes
between something that has no objective correlative because it concerns only
feeling like fear; and what is available to sensation, implying that what is
felt through it has the status of an object. Thus in Eng. something is
immediately grasped that in Fr. v.ms a
strange paradox, viz. that passion, as Bentham notes in Deontology, is a
fictive entity. Thus what sounds in Fr.
like a nominalist provocation is implicated in the folds of the Eng.
language. A symbolic theory of affectivity is thus more easily undertaken in
Eng. than in Fr. , and if an ontological conception of affectivity had to be
formulated in English, symmetrical difficulties would be encountered. Reversible derivations Another particularity
of English, which is not without consequences in Phil. , is that its poverty
from the point of view of inflectional morphology is compensated for by the
freedom and facility it offers for the construction of all sorts of
derivatives. Nominal derivatives based on adjectives and using suffixes such as
-ity, -hood, -ness, -y. The resulting compounds are very difficult to
differentiate in Fr. and to translate in
general, which has led, in contemporary Fr.
tr.s, to various incoherent makeshifts. To list the most common
stumbling blocks: privacy privé-ité, innerness intériorité, not in the same
sense as interiority, vagueness caractère vague, goodness bonté, in the sense
of caractère bon, rightness justesse, “sameness,” similarité, in the sense of
mêmeté, ordinariness, “appropriateness,” caractère ordinaire, approprié,
unaccountability caractère de ce dont il est impossible de rendre compte.
Adjectival derivatives based on nouns, using numerous suffixes: -ful, -ous, -y,
-ic, -ish, -al e.g., meaningful, realistic, holistic, attitudinal, behavioral.
Verbal derivatives based on nouns or adjectives, with the suffixes -ize, -ify,
-ate naturalize, mentalize, falsify, and even without suffixes when possible
e.g., the title of an article “How Not to Russell Carnap’s Aufbau,” i.e., how
not to Russell Carnap’s Aufbau. d. Polycategorial derivatives based on verbs,
using suffixes such as -able, -er, -age, -ismrefutable, truthmaker. The
reversibility of these nominalizations and verbalizations has the essential
result of preventing the reification of qualities or acts. The latter is more
difficult to avoid in Fr. and G. , where
nominalization hardens and freezes notions compare intériorité and innerness,
which designates more a quality, or even, paradoxically, an effect, than an
entity or a domain. But this kind of ease in making compounds has its flip
side: the proliferation of -isms in liberties with the natural uses of the
language. The philosophers ask, e. g. , how they can know that there is a real
object there, but the question How do I know? can be asked in ordinary language
only in certain contexts, that is, where it is always possible, at least in
theory, to eliminate doubt. The doubt or question But is it a real one? has
always must have a special basis, there must be some reason for suggesting that
it isn’t real, in the sense of some specific way in which it is suggested that
this experience or item may be phoney. The wile of the metaphysician consists
in asking Is it a real table? a kind of object which has no obvious way of
being phoney and not specifying or limiting what may be wrong with it, so that
I feel at a loss how to prove it is a real one. It is the use of the word real
in this manner that leads us on to the supposition that real has a single
meaning the real world, material objects, and that a highly profound and
puzzling one. Austin, Philosophical Papers This analysis of real is taken up
again in Sense and Sensibilia, where Austin criticizes the notion of a sense
datum and also a certain way of raising problems supposedly on the basis of
common opinion e. g. , the common opinion that we really perceive things—but in
reality on the basis of a pure construction. To state the case in this way,
Austin says, is simply to soften up the plain man’s alleged views for the
subsequent treatment; it is preparing the way for, by practically attributing
to him, the so-called philosophers’ view. Phil. ’s frequent recourse to the
ordinary is characterized by a certain condescension toward the common man. The
error or deception consists in arguing the philosopher’s position against the
ordinary position, because if the in what we should say when. It is, in other
words, a Phil. of language, but on the
condition that we never forget that we are looking not merely at words or
‘meanings,’ whatever they may be but also at the realities we use the words to
talk about, as Austin emphasizes A Plea for Excuses, in Philosophical Papers.
During the twentieth century or more precisely, between the 1940s and the s,
there was a division of the paradigms of the Phil. of language between the logical clarification
of ordinary language, on the one hand, and the immanent examination of ordinary
language, on the other. The question of ordinary language and the type of
treatment that it should be given—a normative clarification or an internal
examination—is present in and even constitutive of the legacy of logical
positivism. Wittgenstein’s work testifies to this through the movement that it
manifests and performs, from the first task of the Phil. of language the creation of an ideal or
formal language to clarify everyday language to the second the concern to
examine the multiplicity of ordinary language’s uses. The break thus
accomplished is such that one can only agree with Rorty’s statement in his
preface to The Linguistic Turn that the only difference between Ideal Language
Philosophers and Ordinary Language Philosophers is a disagreement about which
language is ideal. In the renunciation of the idea of an ideal language, or a
norm outside language, there is a radical change in perspective that consists
in abandoning the idea of something beyond language: an idea that is
omnipresent in the whole philosophical tradition, and even in current
analytical Phil. . Critique of language and Phil. More generally, Austin criticizes traditional
Phil. for its perverse use of ordinary
language. He constantly denounces Phil. ’s abuse of ordinary language—not so
much that it forgets it, but rather that it exploits it by taking 2 A defect in
the Eng. language? Between according to Bentham Eng. philosophers are not very
inclined toward etymology—no doubt because it is often less traceable than it
is in G. or even in Fr. and discourages a certain kind of commentary.
There are, however, certain exceptions, like Jeremy Bentham’s analysis of the
words “in,” “or,” “between,” “and,” etc., -- cf. Grice on “to” and “or” – “Does
it make sense to speak of the ‘sense’ of ‘to’?” -- through which Eng.
constructs the kinds of space that belong to a very specific topiLet us take
the case of between, which Fr. can
render only by the word entre. Both the semantics and the etymology of entre
imply the number three in Fr. , since what is entre intervenes as a third term
between two others which it separates or brings closer in Lat., in-ter; in Fr.,
en tiers; as a third. This is not the case in English, which constructs between
in accord with the number two in conformity with the etymology of this word, by
tween, in pairs, to the point that it can imagine an ordering, even when it
involves three or more classes, only in the binary mode: comon between three?
relation between three?—the hue of selfcontradictoriness presents itself on the
very face of the phrase. By one of the words in it, the number of objects is
asserted to be three: by another, it is asserted to be no more than two. To the
use thus exclusively made of the word between, what could have given rise, but
a sort of general, howsoever indistinct, perception, that it is only one to one
that objects can, in any continued manner, be commodiously and effectually
compared. The Eng. language labours under a defect, which, when it is compared
in this particular with other European langues, may perhaps be found peculiar
to it. By the derivation, and thence by the inexcludible import, of the word
between i.e., by twain, the number of the objects, to which this operation is
represented as capable of being applied, is confined to two. By the Roman
inter—by its Fr. derivation entre—no
such limitation v.ms to be expressed. Chrestomathia REFS.: Bentham, Jeremy.
ChrestomathiEd. by M. J. Smith and W. H.
Burston. Oxford: Clarendon, To my mind, experience proves amply that we do come
to an agreement on what we should say when such and such a thing, though I
grant you it is often long and difficult. I should add that too often this is
what is missing in Phil. : a preliminary datum on which one might agree at the
outset. We do not claim in this way to discover all the truth that exists
regarding everything. We discover simply the facts that those who have been
using our language for centuries have taken the trouble to notice.
Performatif-Constatif Austinian agreement is possible for two reasons: Ordinary language cannot claim to have the
last word. Only remember, it is the first word Philosophical Papers. The
exploration of language is also an exploration of the inherited experience and
acumen of many generations of men ibid..
Ordinary language is a rich treasury of differences and embodies all the
distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found
worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations. These are certainly more
subtle and solid than any that you or I are likely to think up in our
arm-chairs of an afternoon ibid.. It is this ability to indicate differences
that makes language a common instrument adequate for speaking things in the
world. Who is we? Cavell’s question It is clear that analytical Phil. ,
especially as it has developed in the United States since the 1940s, has moved
away from the Austinian paradigm and has at the same time abandoned a certain
kind of philosophical writing and linguistic subtlety. But that only makes all
the more powerful and surprising the return to Austin advocated by Stanley
Cavell and the new sense of ordinary language Phil. that is emerging in his work and in
contemporary American Phil. . What right do we have to refer to our uses? And
who is this we so crucial for Austin that it constantly recurs in his work? All
we have, as we have said, is what we say and our linguistic agreements. We
determine the meaning of a given word by its uses, and for Austin, it is
nonsensical to ask the question of meaning for instance, in a general way or
looking for an entity; v. NONSENSE. The quest for agreement is founded on
something quite different from signification or the determination of the common
meaning. The agreement Austin is talking about has nothing to do with an
intersubjective consensus; it is not founded on a convention or on actual
agreements. It is an agreement that is as objective as possible and that bears
as much on language as on reality. But what is the precise nature of this
agreement? Where does it come from, and why should so much importance be
accorded to it? That is the question Cavell asks, first in Must We Mean What We
Say? and then in The Claim of Reason: what is it that allows Austin and Witters
to say what they say about what we say? A claim is certainly involved here.
That is what Witters means by our agreement in judgments, and in language it is
based only on itself, on the latter exists, it is not on the same level. The
philosopher introduces into the opinion of the common man particular entities,
in order then to reject, amend, or explain it. The method of ordinary language:
Be your size. Small Men. Austin’s immanent method comes down to examining our
ordinary use of ordinary words that have been confiscated by Phil. , such as
‘true’ and ‘real,’ in order to raise the question of truth: Fact that is a
phrase designed for use in situations where the distinction between a true
statement and the state of affairs about which it is a truth is neglected; as
it often is with advantage in ordinary life, though seldom in Phil. . So
speaking about the fact that is a compendious way of speaking about a situation
involving both words and world. Philosophical Papers We can, of course,
maintain along with a whole trend in analytical Phil. from Frege to Quine that these are
considerations too small and too trivial from which to draw any conclusions at
all. But it is this notion of fact that Austin relies on to determine the
nature of truth and thus to indicate the pertinence of ordinary language as a
relationship to the world. This is the nature of Austin’s approach: the foot of
the letter is the foot of the ladder ibid.. For Austin, ordinary words are part
of the world: we use words, and what makes words useful objects is their
complexity, their refinement as tools ibid.: We use words to inform ourselves
about the things we talk about when we use these words. Or, if that v.ms too
naïve: we use words as a way of better understanding the situation in which we
find ourselves led to make use of words. What makes this claim possible is the
proximity of dimension, of size, between words and ordinary objects. Thus
philosophers should, instead of asking whether truth is a substance, a quality,
or a relation, take something more nearly their own size to strain at ibid..
The Fr. translators render size by
mesure, which v.ms excessively theoretical; the reference is to size in the
material, ordinary sense. One cannot know everything, so why not try something
else? Advantages of slowness and cooperation. Be your size. Small Men.
Conversation cited by Urmson in A Symposium Austin emphasizes that this
technique of examining words which he ended up calling linguistic phenomenology
(and Grice linguistic botany) is not new and that it has existed since
Socrates, producing its slow successes. But Grice is the first to make a
systematic application of such a method, which is based, on the one hand, on
the manageability and familiarity of the objects concerned and, on the other
hand, on the common agreement at which it arrives in each of its stages. The
problem is how to agree on a starting point, that is, on a given. This given or
datum, for Grice, is Gricese, not as a corpus consisting of utterances or
words, but as the site of agreement about what we should say when. Austin
regards language as an empirical datum or experimental dat -- Bayes, T. . An
Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, with Richard
Price’s Foreword and Discussion. In Facsimiles of Two Papers by Bayes. :
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published in 195 . Philosophical Investigations. Tr. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 195 we,
as Cavell says in a passage that illustrates many of the difficulties of tr. we
have discussed up to this point: We learn and teach words in certain contexts,
and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into
further contexts. Nothing ensures that this projection will take place in
particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules,
just as nothing ensures that we will make, and understand, the same
projections. That we do, on the whole, is a matter of our sharing routes of
interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and ‑of significance
and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else,
what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an
appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl of organism Witterscalls forms of
life. Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more,
but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is and because it
is terrifying. Must We Mean What We Say?
The fact that our ordinary language is based only on itself is not only a
reason for concern regarding the validity of what we do and say, but also the
revelation of a truth about ourselves that we do not always want to recognize:
the fact that I am the only possible source of such a validity. That is a new
understanding of the fact that language is our form of life, precisely its
ordinary form. Cavell’s originality lies in his reinvention of the nature of
ordinary language in American thought and in the connection he
establishes—notably through his reference to Emerson and Thoreau, American
thinkers of the ordinary—between this nature of language and human nature,
finitude. It is also in this sense that the question of linguistic agreements
reformulates that of the ordinary human condition and that the acceptance of
the latter goes hand in hand with the recognition of the former. In Cavell’s
Americanization of ordinary language Phil.
there thus emerges a radical form of the return to the ordinary. But
isn’t this ordinary, e. g. , that of Emerson in his Essays, precisely the one
that the whole of Eng. Phil. has been
trying to find, or rather to feel or taste, since its origins? Thus we can
compare the writing of Emerson or James, in texts like Experience or Essays in
Radical Empiricism, with that of the British empiricists when they discuss
experience, the given, and the sensible. This is no doubt one of the principal
dimensions of philosophical writing in English: always to make the meaning more
available to the senses. J.-Pierre Cléro Sandra Laugier REFS.: Austin, J. L.
How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon, . . Performatif-Constatif. In
La philosophie analytique, ed. by J.
Wahl and L. Beck. : Editions du Minuit, . Tr. in Performative-Constative. In
Phil. and Ordinary Language, ed. by E. Caton. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, . . Philosophical Papers. Ed. by
J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Clarendon, . . Sense and
SensibiliOxford: Clarendon, . Ayer, J. The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge.
London: Macmillan, 1940. ENTREPRENEUR 265 form the basis of the kingdom by
means of calculated plans; to the legal domain: someone who contravenes the
hierarchical order of the professions and subverts their rules; finally, to the
economic domain: someone who agrees, on the basis of a prior contract an
established price to execute a project collection of taxes, supply of an army,
a merchant expedition, construction, production, transaction, assuming the hazards
related to exchange and time. This last usage corresponds to practices that
became more and more socially prominent starting in the sixteenth century. Let
us focus on the term in economics. The engagement of the entrepreneur in his
project may be understood in various ways, and the noun entrepreneur translated
in various ways into English: by contractor if the stress is placed on the
engagement with regard to the client to execute the task according to
conditions negotiated in advance a certain time, a fixed price, firm price,
tenant farming; by undertaker now rare in this sense when we focus on the
engagement in the activity, taking charge of the project, its practical
realization, the setting in motion of the transaction; and by adventurer,
enterpriser, and projector, to emphasize the risks related to speculation. At
the end of the eighteenth century, the Fr.
word entreprise acquired the new meaning of an industrial establishment.
Entrepreneur accordingly acquired the sense of the head or direction of a business
of production superintendent, employer, manager. In France, at the beginning of
the eighteenth century, the noun entrepreneur had strong political
connotations, in particular in the abundant pamphlets containing mazarinades
denouncing the entrepreneurs of tax farming. The economist Pierre de
Boisguilbert wrote the Factum de la France, the largest trial ever conducted by
pen against the big financiers, entrepreneurs of the wealth of the kingdom, who
take advantage of its good administration its political economy in the name of
the entrepreneurs of commerce and industry, who contribute to the increase in
its wealth. Boisguilbert failed in his project of reforming the tax farm, or
tax business, and it was left to a clever financier, Richard Cantillon, to
create the economic concept of the entrepreneur. Chance in Business: Risk and
Uncertainty There is no trace of Boisguilbert’s moral indignation in
Cantillon’s Essai sur la nature du commerce en générale Essay on the nature of
commerce in general. Having shown that all the classes and all the men of a
State live or acquire wealth at the expense of the owners of the land bk. 1,
ch.12, he suggests that the circulation and barter of goods and merchandise,
like their production, are conducted in Europe by entrepreneurs and haphazardly
bk. 1, of ch.1 He then describes in detail what composes the uncertain aspect
of the action of an entrepreneur, in which he acts according to his ideas and
without being able to predict, in which he conceives and executes his plans
surrounded by the hazard of events. The uncertainty related to business profits
turns especially on the fact that it is dependent on the forms of consumption
of the owners, the only members of society who are independent—naturally
independent, Cantillon specified. Entrepreneurs are those who are capable of
breaking ÉNONCÉ Énoncé, from the Roman enuntiare to express, divulge; from ex
out and nuntiare to make known; a nuntius is a messenger, a nuncio, ranges over
the same type of entity as do proposition and phrase: it is a basic unit of
syntax, the relevant question being whether or not it is the bearer of truth
values. An examination of the differences among these entities, and the
networks they constitute in different languages especially in English: sentence,
statement, utterance, appears under PROPOSITION. V. also DICTUM and LOGOS, both
of which may be acceptably Tr. énoncé.
Cf. PRINCIPLE, SACHVERHALT, TRUTH, WORD especially WORD, Box The essential feature of an énoncé is that it
is considered to be a singular occurrence and thus is paired with its
énonciation: v. SPEECH ACT; cf. ENGLISH, LANGUAGE, SENSE, SIGN,
SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, WITTICISM. v.
DISCOURSE ENTREPRENEUR FR. ENG.
adventurer, contractor, employer, enterpriser, entrepreneur, manager, projector,
undertaker, superintendent v. ACT,
AGENCY, BERUF, ECONOMY, LIBERAL, OIKONOMIA, PRAXIS, UTILITY. Refs.: G. J.
Warnock, “English philosophy,” H. P. Grice, “Gricese,” BANC.
Grice’s handwave. A sort of handwave can mean in a one-off act of communication
something. It’s the example he uses. By a sort of handwave, the emissor
communicates either that he knows the route or that he is about to leave the
addressee. Handwave signals. Code. Cfr. the Beatles’s HELP. Explicatum: We need
some body – Implicaturum: Not just Any Body. Why does this matter to the
philosopher? The thing is as follows. Grice was provoked by Austin. To defeat
Austin, Grice needs a ‘theory of communication.’ This theory applies his early
reflections on the intentional side to an act of communication. This allows him
to explain the explicatum versus the implicaturum. By analysing each, Grice
notes that there is no need to refer to linguistic entities. So, the centrality
of the handwave is an offshoot of his theory designed to defeat Austin. Gice:
“Blame Paget for my obsession with the hand.” – Refs.: Paget, “Ta-ta: when the
hands are full, use your mouth.” – H. P. Grice, The utterer’s hand-wave.”
Grice’s
creatures: the pirots. The programme he
calls ‘creature construction.’ “I could have used the ‘grice,’ which was
extinct by the time I was born.”
Grice’s myth. Or Griceian myths – The Handbook of Griceian mythology. At
one point Grice suggests that his ‘genitorial programme’ a kind of
ideal-observer theory is meant as ‘didactic,’ and for expository purposes. It
seems easier, as , as Grice and Plato would agree, to answer a question
about the genitorial programme rather than use a first-person approach and
appeal to introspection. Grice refers to the social
contract as a ‘myth,’ which may still explain, as ‘meaning’ does. G. R. Grice
built his career on this myth. This is G. R. Grice, of the social-contract
fame. Cf. Strawson and Wiggins comparing Grice’s myth with Plato’s, and they
know what they are talking about.
Grice’s predicament. S draws a pic- "one-off predicament"). ...
Clarendon, 1976); and Simon
Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) ... But
there is an obvious way of emending the account. Grice points out. ... Blackburn helpfully
suggests that we can cut through much of this complexity by ... The above
account is intended to capture the notion of one-off meaning. Walking in a
forest, having gone some way ahead of the rest of the party, I draw an arrow at
a fork of a path, meaning that those who are following me should go straight
on. Gricean considerations
may be safely ignored. Only when trying to communicate by nonconventional means
("one-off predicament," Blackburn,
1984, chap. Blackburn's mission
is to promote the philosophy of language as a pivotal enquiry ... and
dismissed; the Gricean model
might be suitable to explain one-off acts. The Gricean mechanism
with its complex communicative intentions has a clear point in what Blackburn calls
“a one-off predicament”
- a situation in which an ...
Grice’s shaggy-dog story: While Grice would like to say that it should be in the
range of a rational creature to refer and to predicate, what about the hand
wave? By his handwave, the emissor means that _HE_ (subject) is a knower of the
road (or roate), the predicate after the copula or that he, the emissor,
subject, is (the copula) about to leave his emissee – but there is nothing IN
THE MATTER (the handwave) that can be ‘de-composed’ like that. The FORM
attaches to the communicatum directly. This is strange, but not impossible, and
shows Grice’s programme. Because his idea is that a communicatum need not a
vehicile which is syntactically structured (as “Fido is shaggy”). This is the
story that Grice tells in his lecture. He uses a ‘shaggy-dog’ story to explain
TWO main notions: that of ‘reference’ or denotatio, and that of predicatio. He
had explored that earlier when discussing, giving an illustration “Smith is
happy”, the idea of ‘value,’ as correspondence, where he adds the terms for
‘denote’ and ‘predicatio,’ or actually, ‘designatio’ and ‘indicatio’, need to
be “explained within the theory.” In the utterance ‘Smith is happy,’ the
utterer DESIGNATES an item, Smith. The utterer also INDICATES some class,
‘being happy.’ Grice introduces a shorthand, ‘assign’, or ‘assignatio,’
previous to the value-satisfaction, to involve both the ‘designatio’ and the
‘indicatio’. U assigns the item Smith to the class ‘being happy.’ U’s intention
involves A’s belief that U believes that “the item belongs to the class, or
that he ASSIGNS the item to the class. A predicate, such as
'shaggy,' in my shaggy-dog story, is a part of a bottom-up, or top-bottom, as I
prefer, analysis of this or that sentences, and a predicate, such as 'shaggy,'
is the only indispensable 'part,' or 'element,' as I prefer, since a
predicate is the only 'pars orationis,' to use the old phrase, that must
appear in every sentence. In a later lecture he ventures with ‘reference.’ Lewis
and Short have “rĕferre,” rendered as “to bear, carry, bring, draw, or give
back,” in a “transf.” usage, they render as “to make a reference, to refer
(class.),” asa in “de rebus et obscuris et incertis ad Apollinem censeo
referendum; “ad quem etiam Athenienses publice de majoribus rebus semper
rettulerunt,” Cic. Div. 1, 54, 122.” While Grice uses ‘Fido,’ he could have
used ‘Pegasus’ (Martin’s cat, as it happens) and apply Quine’s adage: we could
have appealed to the ex hypothesi unanalyzable, irreducible attribute of being
Pegasus, adopting, for its expression, the verb 'is-Pegasus', or 'pegasizes'.
And Grice could have played with ‘predicatio’ and ‘subjectio.’ Grice on
subject. Lewis and Short have “sūbĭcĭo,” (less correctly subjĭcĭo ;
post-Aug. sometimes sŭb- ), jēci, jectum, 3, v. a. sub-jacio. which they render as “to throw, lay, place,
or bring under or near (cf. subdo),” and in philosophy, “subjectum , i, n. (sc.
verbum), as “that which is spoken of, the foundation or subject of a
proposition;” “omne quicquid dicimus aut
subjectum est aut de subjecto aut in subjecto est. Subjectum est prima
substantia, quod ipsum nulli accidit alii inseparabiliter, etc.,” Mart. Cap. 4,
§ 361; App. Dogm. Plat. 3, p. 34, 4 et saep.—.” Note that for Mart. Cap. the
‘subject,’ unlike the ‘predicate’ is not a ‘syntactical category.’ “Subjectum
est prima substantia,” The subject is a prote ousia. As for correlation, Grice
ends up with a reductive analysis. By uttering utterance-token V, the
utterer U correlates predicate P1 with (and only with) each member of
P2 ≡ (∃R)(∃R') (1) U effects that (∀x)(R P1x ≡
x ∈ P1) and (2) U
intends (1), and (3) U intends that (∀y)(R'
P1y ≡ y ∈
P1), where R' P1 is an expression-type such that utterance-token V is a
sequence consisting of an expression-token p1 of expression-type P1 and an
expression-token p2 of expression-type P2, the R-co-relatum of which is a
set of which y is a member. And he is back with ‘denotare. Lewis and Short have
“dēnŏtare,” which they render as “to mark, set a mark on, with chalk, color,
etc.: “pedes venalium creta,”
It is interesting to trace Grice’s earliest investigations on this. Grice and
Strawson stage a number of joint seminars on topics related to the notions of
meaning, categories, and logical form. Grice and Strawson engage in systematic
and unsystematic philosophical exploration. From these discussions springs work
on predication and categories, one or two reflections of which are acknowledge
at two places (re: the reductive analysis of a ‘particular,’ “the tallest man
that did, does, or will exist” --) in Strawson’s “Particular and general” for
The Aristotelian Society – and “visible” as Grice puts it, but not
acknowledged, in Strawson’s “Individuals: an essay in descriptive
metaphysics.””
Grice’s theory-theory: “I am perhaps not too happy with the word ‘theory,’ as
applied to this, but that’s Ramsey for you” (WoW: 285). Grice’s theory-theory: A theory of mind concerning how we come to know
about the propositional attitudes of others. It tries to explain the nature of
ascribing certain thoughts, beliefs, or intentions to other persons in order to
explain their actions. The theory-theory holds that in ascribing beliefs to
others we are tacitly applying a theory that enables us to make inferences
about the beliefs behind the actions of others. The theory that is applied is a
set of rules embedded in folk psychology. Hence, to anticipate and predict the
behavior of others, one engages in an intellectual process moving by inference from one set of beliefs
to another. This position contrasts with another theory of mind, the simulation
theory, which holds that we need to make use of our own motivational and
emotional resources and capacities for practical reasoning in explaining
actions of others. “So called ‘theory-theorists’ maintain that the ability to
explain and predict behaviour is underpinned by a folk-psychological theory of
the structure and functioning of the mind – where the theory in question may be
innate and modularised, learned individually, or acquired through a process of
enculturation.” Carruthers and Smith (eds.), Theories of Theories of Mind. Grice
needs a theory. For those into implicatura and conversation as rational
cooperation, when introducing the implicaturum he mentions ‘pre-theoretical
adequacy’ of the model. So he is thinking of the conversational theory as a
theory in the strict sense, with ‘explanatory’ and not merely taxonomical
power. So one task is to examine in which way the conversational theory is a
theory that explains, rather than merely ad hoc ex post facto commentary. Not so much for his approach to mean. He
polemises with Rountree, of Somerville, that you dont need a thory to analyse mean.
Indeed, you cannot have a theory to analyse mean, because mean is a matter of
intuition, not a theoretical concept. But Grice appeals to theory, when dealing
with willing. He knows what willing means because he relies on a concept of
folk-science. In this folk-science, willing is a theoretical concept. Grice
arrived at this conclusion by avoiding the adjective souly, and seeing that
there is no word to describe willing other than by saying it is a psychoLOGICAL
concept, i.e. part of a law within that theory of folk-science. That law will include,
by way of ramsified naming or describing willing as a predicate-constant. Now,
this is related to metaphysics. His liberal or ecunmenical metaphysics is best
developed in terms of his ontological marxism presented just after he has
expanded on this idea of willing as a theoretical concept, within a law
involving willing (say, Grices Optimism-cum-Pesimism law), within the
folk-science of psychology that explains his behaviour. For Aristotle, a
theoria, was quite a different animal, but it had to do with contemplatio,
hence the theoretical (vita contemplativa) versus the practical (vita activa).
Grices sticking to Aristotle’srare use of theory inspires him to develop his
fascinating theory of the theory-theory.
Grice realised that there is no way to refer to things like intending
except with psychological, which he takes to mean, belonging to a pscyhological
theory. Grice was keen to theorise on theorising. He thought that
Aristotle’s first philosophy (prote philosophia) is best rendered as Theory-theory.
Grice kept using Oxonian English spelling, theorising, except when he did
not! Grice calls himself folksy: his theories, even if Subjects to various
types of Ramseyfication, are popular in kind! And ceteris
paribus! Metaphysical construction is disciplined and the best theorising
the philosopher can hope for! The way Grice conceives of his theory-theory
is interesting to revisit. A route by which Grice hopes to show the centrality
of metaphysics (as prote philosophia) involves taking seriously a few ideas. If
any region of enquiry is to be successful as a rational enterprise,
its deliverance must be expressable in the shape of one or another of the
possibly different types of theory. A characterisation of the nature and
range of a possible kind of theory θ is needed. Such a body of
characterisation must itself be the outcome of rational enquiry, and
so must itself exemplify whatever requirement it lays down for any
theory θ in general. The characterisation must itself be
expressible as a theory θ, to be called, if you like, Grice
politely puts it, theory-theory, or meta-theory, θ2. Now, the
specification and justification of the ideas and material presupposed
by any theory θ, whether such account falls within the bounds of
Theory-theory, θ2 would be properly called prote philosophia (first
philosophy) and may turn out to relate to what is generally accepted as
belonging to the Subjects matter of metaphysics. It might, for example,
turn out to be establishable that any theory θ has to relate to a
certain range of this or that Subjects item, has to attribute to each item this
or that predicate or attribute, which in turn has to fall within one or another
of the range of types or categories. In this way, the enquiry might lead
to recognised metaphysical topics, such as the nature of being, its range of
application, the nature of predication and a systematic account of
categories. Met. , philosophical eschatology, and Platos Republic,
Thrasymachus, social justice, Socrates, along with notes on Zeno, and topics
for pursuit, repr.in Part II, Explorations in semantics and metaphysics
to WOW , metaphysics, philosophical eschatology, Platos Republic, Socrates,
Thrasymachus, justice, moral right, legal right, Athenian dialectic.
Philosophical eschatology is a sub-discipline of metaphysics concerned with
what Grice calls a category shift. Grice, having applied such a technique to
Aristotle’s aporia on philos (friend) as alter ego, uses it now to tackle
Socratess view, against Thrasymachus, that right applies primarily to morality,
and secondarily to legality. Grice has a specific reason to include this in his
WOW Grices exegesis of Plato on justice displays Grices take on the fact that
metaphysics needs to be subdivided into ontology proper and what he calls
philosophical eschatology, for the study of things like category shift and
other construction routines. The exploration of Platos Politeia thus becomes an
application of Grices philosophically eschatological approach to the item just,
as used by Socrates (morally just) and Thrasymachus (legally just). Grice has
one specific essay on Aristotle in PPQ. So he thought Plato merited his own
essay, too! Grices focus is on Plato’s exploration of dike. Grice is concerned
with a neo-Socratic (versus neo-Thrasymachean) account of moral justice as
conceptually (or axiologically) prior to legal justice. In the proceeding, he
creates philosophical eschatology as the other branch to metaphysics, along
with good ol ontology. To say that just crosses a categorial barrier (from
the moral to the legal) is to make a metaphysical, strictly eschatological,
pronouncement. The Grice Papers locate the Plato essay in s. II, the Socrates essay in s. III, and the Thrasymachus essay, under social
justice, in s. V. Grice is well aware that in his account of fairness, Rawls
makes use of his ideas on personal identity. The philosophical elucidation of
fairness is of great concern for Grice. He had been in touch with such
explorations as Nozicks and Nagels along anti-Rawlsian lines. Grices ideas on
rationality guide his exploration of social justice. Grice keeps revising the
Socrates notes. The Plato essay he actually dates. As it happens, Grices most
extensive published account of Socrates is in this commentary on Platos
Republic: an eschatological commentary, as he puts it. In an entertaining
fashion, Grice has Socrates, and neo-Socrates, exploring the logic and grammar
of just against the attack by Thrasymachus and neo-Thrasymachus. Grices point
is that, while the legal just may be conceptually prior to the moral just, the
moral just is evaluationally or axiologically prior. Refs.: There is a specific
essay on ‘theorising’ in the Grice Papers, but there are scattered sources
elsewhere, such as “Method” (repr. in “Conception”), BANC.
Grice’s
three-year-old’s guide to Russell’s theory of types, with an advice to parents
by Strawson: Grice put
forward the empirical hypothesis that a three-year old CAN understand Russell’s
theory of types. “In more than one way.” This brought confusion in the
household, with some members saying they could not – “And I trust few of your
tutees do!” Russell’s influential solution to the problem of logical paradoxes.
The theory was developed in particular to overcome Russell’s paradox, which
seemed to destroy the possibility of Frege’s logicist program of deriving
mathematics from logic. Suppose we ask whether the set of all sets which are
not members of themselves is a member of itself. If it is, then it is not, but
if it is not, then it is. The theory of types suggests classifying objects,
properties, relations, and sets into a hierarchy of types. For example, a class
of type 0 has members that are ordinary objects; type 1 has members that are
properties of objects of type 0; type 2 has members that are properties of the
properties in type 1; and so on. What can be true or false of items of one type
can not significantly be said about those of another type and is simply
nonsense. If we observe the prohibitions against classes containing members of
different types, Russell’s paradox and similar paradoxes can be avoided. The
theory of types has two variants. The simple theory of types classifies
different objects and properties, while the ramified theory of types further
sorts types into levels and adds a hierarchy of levels to that of types. By
restricting predicates to those that relate to items of lower types or lower
levels within their own type, predicates giving rise to paradox are excluded.
The simple theory of types is sufficient for solving logical paradoxes, while
the ramified theory of type is introduced to solve semantic paradoxes, that is,
paradoxes depending on notions such as reference and truth. “Any expression
containing an apparent variable is of higher type than that variable. This is
the fundamental principles of the doctrines of types.” Russell, Logic and
Knowledge. Grice’s commentary in “In defense
of a dogma,” The H. P. Grice Papers, BANC.
villa grice: -- Kept by Luigi Speranza -- Grice kept a nice garden in
his cottage on Banbury Road, not far from St. John’s. It was more of a villa
than his town house at Harborne. While Grice loved Academia, he also loved
non-Academia. He would socialize at the Flag and Lamb, at the Bird and Baby,
and the cricket club, at the bridge club, etc. In this way, he goes back to Plato’s
idea of an ‘academy,’ established
by Plato at his villa outside Athens near the public park and gymnasium known
by that name. Although it may not have maintained a continuous tradition, the
many and varied philosophers of the Academy all considered themselves Plato’s
successors, and all of them celebrated and studied his work. The school
survived in some form until A.D. 529, when it was dissolved, along with the
other pagan schools, by the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I. The history of
the Academy is divided by some authorities into that of the Old Academy Plato,
Speusippus, Xenocrates, and their followers and the New Academy the Skeptical
Academy of the third and second centuries B.C.. Others speak of five phases in
its history: Old as before, Middle Arcesilaus, New Carneades, Fourth Philo of
Larisa, and Fifth Antiochus of Ascalon. For most of its history the Academy was
devoted to elucidating doctrines associated with Plato that were not entirely
explicit in the dialogues. These “unwritten doctrines” were apparently passed
down to his immediate successors and are known to us mainly through the work of
Aristotle: there are two opposed first principles, the One and the Indefinite
Dyad Great and Small; these generate Forms or Ideas which may be identified
with numbers, from which in turn come intermediate mathematicals and, at the
lowest level, perceptible things Aristotle, Metaphysics I.6. After Plato’s
death, the Academy passed to his nephew Speusippus, who led the school until
his death. Although his written works have perished, his views on certain main
points, along with some quotations, were recorded by surviving authors. Under
the influence of late Pythagoreans, Speusippus anticipated Plotinus by holding
that the One transcends being, goodness, and even Intellect, and that the Dyad
which he identifies with matter is the cause of all beings. To explain the
gradations of beings, he posited gradations of matter, and this gave rise to
Aristotle’s charge that Speusippus saw the universe as a series of disjointed
episodes. Speusippus abandoned the theory of Forms as ideal numbers, and gave
heavier emphasis than other Platonists to the mathematicals. Xenocrates who
once went with Plato to Sicily, succeeded Speusippus and led the Academy till
his own death. Although he was a prolific author, Xenocrates’ works have not
survived, and he is known only through the work of other authors. He was
induced by Aristotle’s objections to reject Speusippus’s views on some points,
and he developed theories that were a major influence on Middle Platonism, as
well as on Stoicism. In Xenocrates’ theory the One is Intellect, and the Forms
are ideas in the mind of this divine principle; the One is not transcendent,
but it resides in an intellectual space above the heavens. While the One is
good, the Dyad is evil, and the sublunary world is identified with Hades.
Having taken Forms to be mathematical entities, he had no use for intermediate
mathematicals. Forms he defined further as paradigmatic causes of regular
natural phenomena, and soul as self-moving number. Polemon led the Academy, and
was chiefly known for his fine character, which set an example of self-control
for his students. The Stoics probably derived their concept of oikeiosis an
accommodation to nature from his teaching. After Polemon’s death, his colleague
Crates led the Academy until the accession of Arcesilaus. The New Academy arose
when Arcesilaus became the leader of the school and turned the dialectical
tradition of Plato to the Skeptical aim of suspending belief. The debate
between the New Academy and Stoicism dominated philosophical discussion for the
next century and a half. On the Academic side the most prominent spokesman was
Carneades. In the early years of the first century B.C., Philo of Larisa
attempted to reconcile the Old and the New Academy. His pupil, the former
Skeptic Antiochus of Ascalon, was enraged by this and broke away to refound the
Old Academy. This was the beginning of Middle Platonism. Antiochus’s school was
eclectic in combining elements of Platonism, Stoicism, and Aristotelian
philosophy, and is known to us mainly through Cicero’s Academica. Middle
Platonism revived the main themes of Speusippus and Xenocrates, but often used
Stoic or neo-Pythagorean concepts to explain them. The influence of the Stoic
Posidonius was strongly felt on the Academy in this period, and Platonism
flourished at centers other than the Academy in Athens, most notably in
Alexandria, with Eudorus and Philo of Alexandria. After the death of Philo, the
center of interest returned to Athens, where Plutarch of Chaeronia studied with
Ammonius at the Academy, although Plutarch spent most of his career at his home
in nearby Boeotia. His many philosophical treatises, which are rich sources for
the history of philosophy, are gathered under the title Moralia; his interest
in ethics and moral education led him to write the Parallel Lives paired
biographies of famous Romans and Athenians, for which he is best known. After
this period, the Academy ceased to be the name for a species of Platonic
philosophy, although the school remained a center for Platonism, and was
especially prominent under the leadership of the Neoplatonist Proclus.
griceism. Gricese. At Oxford, it was usual to refer to Austin’s
idiolect as Austinese. In analogy with Grecism, we have a Gricism, a Griceian
cliché. Cf. a ‘grice’ and ‘griceful’ in ‘philosopher’s lexicon.’ Gricese is a
Latinism, from -ese, word-forming element, from Old French -eis (Modern French -ois, -ais), from Vulgar Latin, from Latin -ensem, -ensis "belonging
to" or "originating in."
grecianism: why was Grice obsessed with Socrates’s convesations? He
does not say. But he implicates it. For the Athenian dialecticians, it is all a
matter of ta legomena. Ditto for the Oxonian dialecticians. Ta legomena becomes
ordinary language. And the task of the philosopher is to provide reductive
analysis of this or that concept in terms of necessary and sufficient
conditions. Cf. Hospers. Grices review of the history of philosophy (Philosophy
is but footnotes to Zeno.). Grice enjoyed Zenos answer, What is a friend? Alter
ego, Allego. ("Only it was the other Zeno." Grice tried to apply the
Socratic method during his tutorials. "Nothing like a heartfelt dedication
to the Socratic art of mid-wifery, seeking to bring forth error and to strangle
it at birth.” μαιεύομαι (A.“μαῖα”), ‘to serve as a midwife, act a; “ἡ
Ἄρτεμις μ.” Luc. D Deor.26.2. 2. cause delivery to take place, “ἱκανὴ ἔκπληξις
μαιεύσασθαι πρὸ τῆς ὥρας” Philostr. VA1.5. 3. c. acc., bring to the birth, Marin.Procl.6;
ὄρνιθας μ. hatch chickens, Anon. ap. Suid.; αἰετὸν κάνθαρος μαιεύσομαι, prov.
of taking vengeance on a powerful enemy, Ar. Lys.695 (cf. Sch.). 4. deliver a
woman, esp. metaph. in Pl. of the Socratic method, Tht. 149b. II. Act., Poll.
4.208, Sch. OH.4.506. Pass., τὰ ὑπ᾽ ἐμοῦ μαιευθέντα brought into the world by
me, Pl. Tht. 150e, cf. Philostr.VA5.13. Refs.: the obvious references are
Grice’s allusions to Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Zeno, The H. P. Grice Papers,
BANC.
grosseteste: Grice was a member
of the Grosseteste Society. Like Grice’s friend, G. J. Warnock, Grosseteste was
chancellor of Oxford. Only that by the time of Warnock, the monarch is the
chancellor by default, so “Warnock had to allow to be called ‘vice-chancelor’
to Elizabeth II.” “I would never have read Aristotle had it not been by this
great head that grosseteste (“Greathead” is a common surname in Suffolk).” – H.
P. Grice. English philosopher who began life on the bottom rung of feudal
society in Suffolk and became one of the most influential figures in
pre-Reformation England. He studied at Oxford, obtaining an “M. A.,” like Grice.
Sometime after this period he joined the household of William de Vere, of
Hereford. Grosseteste associated with the elite at Hereford, several of whose
members were part of an advanced philosophical tradition. It was a centre for
the study of liberal arts. This explains his interest in dialectics. After a
sojourn in Paris, he becomes the first chancellor of Oxford. He was a secular
lecturer in theology to the recently established Franciscan order at Oxford. It
was during his tenure with the Franciscans that he studied Grecian an unusual endeavour for an Oxonian schoolman
then. He later moved to Lincoln. As a
scholar, Grosseteste is an original thinker who used Aristotelian and
Augustinian theses as points of departure. Grosseteste (or “Greathead,” as he
was called by the town – if not the gown) believes, with Aristotle, that sense
is the basis of all knowledge, and that the basis for sense is our discovery of
the cause of what is experienced or revealed by experiment. He also believes,
with Augustine, that light plays an important role in creation. Thus he
maintained that God produced the world by first creating prime matter (“materia
prima”) from which issued a point of light lux, the first corporeal form or
power, one of whose manifestations is visible light. The diffusion of this
light resulted in extension or tri-dimensionality in the form of the nine
concentric celestial spheres and the four terrestrial spheres of fire, air,
water, and earth. According to Grosseteste, the diffusion of light takes place
in accordance with laws of mathematical proportionality geometry. Everything,
therefore, is a manifestation of light, and mathematics is consequently
indispensable to science and knowledge generally. The principles Grosseteste
employs to support his views are presented in, e.g., his commentary on
Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, the De luce, and the De lineis, angulis et
figuris. He worked in areas as seemingly disparate as optics and angelology.
Grosseteste is one of the first to take an interest in and introduce into the
Oxford curriculum newly recovered Aristotelian texts, along with commentaries
on them. His work and interest in natural philosophy, mathematics, the Bible,
and languages profoundly influenced Roger Bacon, and the educational goals of
the Franciscan order. It also helped to stimulate work in these areas.
groot -- grotius, h., de
groot, philosopher, a founder of modern views of international law and a major
theorist of natural law. A lawyer and Latinist, Grotius developed a new view of
the law of nature in order to combat moral skepticism and to show how there
could be rational settlement of moral disputes despite religious disagreements.
He argued in The Law of War and Peace 1625 that humans are naturally both
competitive and sociable. The laws of nature show us how we can live together
despite our propensity to conflict. They can be derived from observation of our
nature and situation. These laws reflect the fact that each individual
possesses rights, which delimit the social space within which we are free to
pursue our own goals. Legitimate government arises when we give up some rights
in order to save or improve our lives. The obligations that the laws of nature
impose would bind us, Grotius notoriously said, even if God did not exist; but
he held that God does enforce the laws. They set the limits on the laws that
governments may legitimately impose. The laws of nature reflect our possession
of both precise perfect rights of justice, which can be protected by force, and
imperfect rights, which are not enforceable, nor even statable very precisely.
Grotius’s views on our combative but sociable nature, on the function of the
law of nature, and on perfect and imperfect rights were of central importance
in later discussions of morality and law.
Grice’s
grue and grellow, -- and bleen: H. P. Grice was fascinated by Goodman’s
‘grue’ paradox and kept looking for the crucial implicaturum. “The paradox is
believed to be mainly as arising within the theory of induction, but I’ve seen
Strawson struggling with gruesome consequences in his theory of deduction,
too.” According to Nelson Goodman, “a philosopher from the New World,” every
intuitively acceptable inductive argument, call it A, may be mimicked by
indefinitely many other inductive arguments
each seemingly quite analogous to A and therefore seemingly as
acceptable, yet each nonetheless intuitively *unacceptable*, and each yielding
a conclusion contradictory to that of A, given the assumption that sufficiently
many and varied of the sort of things induced upon exist as yet unexamined
which is the only circumstance in which A is of interest. “Goodman then asks us
to suppose an intuitively acceptable inductive argument.”A1 every hitherto
observed EMERALD is GREEN; therefore, every emerald is green. Now introduce the
totally unnatural colour predicate ‘grue’ – a portmanteau of blue and green –
as in Welsh ‘glas’ -- where for some given, as yet wholly future, temporal
interval T an object is ‘grue’ provided it has the property of being green and
first examined before T OR blue and NOT
first examined before T. Then consider the following inductive argument: A2 every
hitherto observed EMERALD is GRUE; therefore, every emerald is grue. The
premise is true, and A2 is formally analogous to A1. But A2 is intuitively
unacceptable. If there is an emerald UNexamined before T, he conclusion of A2
says that this emerald is blue, whereas the conclusion of A1 says that every
emerald is green! Granted, other counter-intuitive competing arguments could be
given, e.g.: A3. Every hitherto observed emerald is grellow; therefore, every
emeralds is grellow. where an object is ‘grellow’ provided it is green and
located on the earth or yellow otherwise. It would seem, therefore, that some
restriction on induction is required. “Goodman’s alleged of induction offers
two challenges. First, state the restriction
i.e., demarcate the intuitively acceptable inductions from the
unacceptable ones, in some general way, without constant appeal to intuition.”“Second,
justify our preference for the one group of inductions over the other.”“These
two parts of the paradox are, alas, often conflated.”But it is at least
conceivable that one might solve the analytical, demarcative part without
solving the justificatory part, and, perhaps, vice versa. It will not do to
rule out, a priori gruesome” variances in nature. H2O varies in its physical
state along the parameter of temperature. If so, why might not one emerald vary
in colour along the parameter of time of first examination? One approach to the
problem of restriction is to focus on the conclusions of inductive arguments
e.g., every emerald is green, every emerald is grue and to distinguish those
which may legitimately so serve called “projectible hypotheses” from those
which may not. The question then arises whether only non-gruesome hypotheses
those which do not contain gruesome predicates are projectible. Aside from the
task of defining ‘gruesome predicate’ which could be done structurally relative
to a preferred language, the answer is no. Consider the predicate ‘x is solid
and less than 0; C, or liquid and more than 0; C but less than 100; C, or
gaseous and more than 100; C.’This is gruesome on any plausible structural
account of gruesomeness. Note the similarity to the ‘grue’ equivalent: green
and first examined before T, or blue and not first examined before T.
Nevertheless, where nontransitional water is pure H2O at one atmosphere of
pressure save that which is in a transitional state, i.e., melting/freezing or
boiling/condensing, i.e., at 0°C or 100; C, we happily project the hypothesis
that all non-transitional water falls under the above gruesome predicate.
Perhaps this is because, if we rewrite the projection about non-transitional
water as a conjunction of non-gruesome hypotheses i water at less than 0; C is solid, ii water
at more than 0; C but less than 100; C is liquid, and iii water at more than
100; C is gaseous we note that iiii are
all supported there are known positive instances; whereas if we rewrite the
gruesome projection about the emerald as a conjunction of non-gruesome
hypotheses i* every emerald first
examined before T is green, and ii* every emerald NOT first examined before T
is blue we note that ii* is as yet
unsupported. It would seem that, whereas a non-gruesome hypothesis is
projectible provided it is unviolated and supported, a gruesome hypothesis is
projectible provided it is unviolated and equivalent to a conjunction of
non-gruesome hypotheses, each of which is supported.
grundnorm: Grice knows about
the ground and the common ground – and then there’s the ground norm -- also
called basic norm, in a legal system, the norm that determines the legal validity
of all other norms. The content of such an ultimate norm may provide, e.g.,
that norms created by a legislature or by a court are legally valid. The
validity of such an ultimate norm cannot be established as a matter of social
fact such as the social fact that the norm is accepted by some group within a
society. Rather, the validity of the basic norm for any given legal system must
be presupposed by the validity of the norms that it legitimates as laws. The
idea of a basic norm is associated with the legal philosopher Hans Kelsen.
guise -- Castaneda, H.
N., analytical philosopher. Heavily influenced by his own critical reaction to
Quine, Chisholm, and his teacher Wilfrid Sellars, Castañeda published four
books and more than 175 essays. His work combines originality, rigor, and
penetration, together with an unusual comprehensiveness his network of theory and criticism reaches
into nearly every area of philosophy, including action theory; deontic logic
and practical reason; ethics; history of philosophy; metaphysics and ontology;
philosophical methodology; philosophy of language, mind, and perception; and
the theory of knowledge. His principal contributions are to metaphysics and
ontology, indexical reference, and deontic logic and practical reasoning. In
metaphysics and ontology, Castañeda’s chief work is guise theory, first
articulated in a 4 essay, a complex and global account of language, mind,
ontology, and predication. By holding that ordinary concrete individuals,
properties, and propositions all break down or separate into their various
aspects or guises, he theorizes that thinking and reference are directed toward
the latter. Each guise is a genuine item in the ontological inventory, having
properties internally and externally. In addition, guises are related by
standing in various sameness relations, only one of which is the familiar
relation of strict identity. Since every guise enjoys bona fide ontological
standing, whereas only some of these actually exist, Castañeda’s ontology and
semantics are Meinongian. With its intricate account of predication, guise
theory affords a unified treatment of a wide range of philosophical problems
concerning reference to nonexistents, negative existentials, intentional
identity, referential opacity, and other matters. Castañeda also played a
pivotal role in emphasizing the significance of indexical reference. If, e.g.,
Paul assertively utters ‘I prefer Chardonnay’, it would obviously be incorrect
for Bob to report ‘Paul says that I prefer Chardonnay’, since the last
statement expresses Bob’s speaker’s reference, not Paul’s. At the same time,
Castañeda contends, it is likewise incorrect for Bob to report Paul’s saying as
either ‘Paul says that Paul prefers Chardonnay’ or ‘Paul says that Al’s
luncheon guest prefers Chardonnay’ when Paul is Al’s only luncheon guest, since
each of these fail to represent the essentially indexical element of Paul’s
assertion. Instead, Bob may correctly report ‘Paul says that he himself prefers
Chardonnay’, where ‘he himself’ is a quasi-indicator, serving to depict Paul’s
reference to himself qua self. For Castañeda and others, quasi-indicators are a
person’s irreducible, essential means for describing the thoughts and
experiences of others. A complete account of his view of indexicals, together
with a full articulation of guise theory and his unorthodox theories of
definite descriptions and proper names, is contained in Thinking, Language, and
Experience 9. Castañeda’s main views on practical reason and deontic logic turn
on his fundamental practitionproposition distinction. A number of valuable
essays on these views, together with his important replies, are collected in
James E. Tomberlin, ed., Agent, Language, and the Structure of the World 3, and
Tomberlin, ed., Hector-Neri Castañeda 6. The latter also includes Castañeda’s
revealing intellectual autobiography. guise theory, a system developed by
Castañeda to resolve a number of issues concerning the content of thought and
experience, including reference, identity statements, intensional contexts,
predication, existential claims, perception, and fictional discourse. For
example, since i Oedipus believed that he killed the man at the crossroads, and
ii the man at the crossroads was his Oedipus’s father, it might seem that iii
Oedipus believed that he killed his father. Guise theory blocks this derivation
by taking ‘was’ in ii to express, not genuine identity, but a contingent
sameness relation betweeen the distinct referents of the descriptions. Definite
descriptions are typically treated as referential, contrary to Russell’s theory
of descriptions, and their referents are identical in both direct and indirect
discourse, contrary to Frege’s semantics. To support this solution, guise
theory offers unique accounts of predication and singular referents. The latter
are individual guises, which, like Fregean senses and Meinong’s incomplete
objects, are thinly individuated aspects or “slices” of ordinary objects at
best. Every guise is a structure c{F1 . . . , Fn} where c is an operator
expressed by ‘the’ in English
transforming a set of properties {F1, . . . , Fn} into a distinct
concrete individual, each property being an internal property of the guise.
Guises have external properties by standing in various sameness relations to
other guises that have these properties internally. There are four such
relations, besides genuine identity, each an equivalence relation in its field.
If the oldest philosopher happens to be wise, e.g., wisdom is factually
predicated of the guise ‘the oldest philosopher’ because it is consubstantiated
with ‘the oldest wise philosopher’. Other sameness relations account for
fictional predication consociation and necessary external predication
conflation. Existence is self-consubstantiation. An ordinary physical object
is, at any moment, a cluster of consubstantiated hence, existing guises, while
continuants are formed through the transubstantiation of guises within
temporally distinct clusters. There are no substrates, and while every guise
“subsists,” not all exist, e.g., the Norse God of Thunder. The position thus
permits a unified account of singular reference. One task for guise theory is
to explain how a “concretized” set of properties differs internally from a mere
set. Perhaps guises are façons de penser whose core sets are concretized if
their component properties are conceived as coinstantiated, with non-existents
analyzable in terms of the failure of the conceived properties to actually be
coinstantiated. However, it is questionable whether this approach can achieve all
that Castañeda demands of guise theory.
habermas: j. Habermas cites
Grice quite extensively,, “but as extensive as he is, the more wishy washy he
becomes” – A. M. Kemmerling. J. philosopher and social theorist, a leading
representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School of critical
theory. His work has consistently returned to the problem of the normative
foundations of social criticism and critical social inquiry not supplied in
traditional Marxism and other forms of critical theory, such as postmodernism.
His habilitation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 1, is an
influential historical analysis of the emergence of the ideal of a public
sphere in the eighteenth century and its subsequent decline. Habermas turned
then to the problems of the foundations and methodology of the social sciences,
developing a criticism of positivism and his own interpretive explanatory
approach in The Logic of the Social Sciences 3 and his first major systematic
work, Knowledge and Human Interests 7. Rejecting the unity of method typical of
positivism, Habermas argues that social inquiry is guided by three distinct
interests: in control, in understanding, and in emancipation. He is especially
concerned to use emancipatory interest to overcome the limitations of the model
of inquiry based on understanding and argues against “universality of
hermeneutics” defended by hermeneuticists such as Gadamer and for the need to
supplement interpretations with explanations in the social sciences. As he came
to reject the psychoanalytic vocabulary in which he formulated the interest in
emancipation, he turned to finding the basis for understanding and social
inquiry in a theory of rationality more generally. In the next phase of his
career he developed a comprehensive social theory, culminating in his
two-volume The Theory of Communicative Action 2. The goal of this theory is to
develop a “critical theory of modernity,” on the basis of a comprehensive
theory of communicative as opposed to instrumental rationality. The first
volume develops a theory of communicative rationality based on “discourse,” or
second-order communication that takes place both in everyday interaction and in
institutionalized practices of argumentation in science, law, and criticism.
This theory of rationality emerges from a universal or “formal” pragmatics, a
speech act theory based on making explicit the rules and norms of the
competence to communicate in linguistic interaction. The second volume develops
a diagnosis of modern society as suffering from “onesided rationalization,”
leading to disruptions of the communicative lifeworld by “systems” such as
markets and bureaucracies. Finally, Habermas applies his conception of
rationality to issues of normative theory, including ethics, politics, and the
law. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Moral Justification” 2 argues for
an intersubjective notion of practical reason and discursive procedure for the
justification of universal norms. This “discourse principle” provides a
dialogical version of Kant’s idea of universalization; a norm is justified if
and only if it can meet with the reasoned agreement of all those affected.
Between Facts and Norms 2 combines his social and normative theories to give a
systematic account of law and democracy. His contribution here is an account of
deliberative democracy appropriate to the complexity of modern society. His
work in all of these phases provides a systematic defense and critique of
modern institutions and a vindication of the universal claims of public
practical reason.
bradley’s
thatness: :The investing of
the content, which is in Bradleian language a `what', with self-existent reality or ‘that-ness'." Athenaeum 24 Dec. 1904’ If thought
asserted the existence of any content which was not an actual or possible
object of thought—certainly that assertion in my judgment would contradict
itself. But the Other which I maintain, is not any such content, nor is it
another separated “ what,” nor in any case do I suggest that it lies outside
intelligence. Everything, all will and feeling, is an object for thought, and
must be called intelligible. This is certain; but, if so, what becomes of the
Other? If we fall back on the mere “ that,” thatness itself seems a distinction
made by thought. And we have to face this difficulty: If the Other exists, it
must be something; and if it is nothing, it certainly does not exist. There is only one way to get rid
of contradiction, and that way is by dissolution. Instead of one subject
distracted, we get a larger subject with distinctions, and so the tension is
removed. We have at first A, which possesses the qualities c and b,
inconsistent adjectives which collide; and we go on to produce harmony by
making a distinction within this subject. That was really not mere A, but
either a complex within A, or (rather here) a wider whole in which A is
included. The real subject is A + D; and this subject contains the
contradiction made harmless by division, since A is c and D is b. This is the
general principle, and I will attempt here to apply it in particular. Let us
suppose the reality to be X (abcdefg . . .), and that we are able only to get
partial views of this reality. Let us first take such a view as “ X (ab) is b.”
This (rightly or wrongly) we should probably call a true view. For the content
b does plainly belong to the subject; and, further, the appearance also—in
other words, the separation of b in the predicate—can partly be explained. For,
answering to this separation, we postulate now another adjective in the subject:
let us call it *. The “ thatness,” the psychical existence of the predicate,
which at first was neglected, has now also itself been included in the subject.
We may hence write the subject as X (ab*); and in this way we seem to avoid
contradiction. Let us go further on the same line, and, having dealt with a
truth, pass next to an error. Take the subject once more as X (abcde . . .),
and let us now say “ X (ab) is d.”
To be different from another is to have already transcended one’s own
being; and all finite existence is thus incurably relative and ideal. Its
quality falls, more or less, outside its particular “ thatness”; and, whether
as the same or again as diverse, it is equally made what it is by community
with others.
The
hic, the hæc, and the hoc – “Scotus was being clever. Since he wanted an
abstract noun, and abstract nouns are feminine in both Greek and Latin
(‘ippotes, eqquitas’), he chose the feminine ‘haec,’ to turn into a ‘thisness.’
But we should expand his rather sexist view to apply to ‘hic’ and ‘hoc,’ too.
In Anglo-Saxon, there is only ‘this,’ with ‘thisness’ first used by Pope
George. The OED first registers ‘thisness’ in 1643.” – cf. OED: "It is at its such-&-suchness,
at its
character -- in other words, at the
_universal_ in it -- that we have to
look. the first cite in the
OED for 'thisness' also features 'thatness': "thisness,” from
"this" + "-ness": rendering ‘haecceitas,’ the quality of
being 'this' (as distinct from anything else): = haecceity. First cite:
"It is evident that [...] THISness, and THATness belong[...] not to matter
by itself, but onely as [matter] is distinguished & individuated by the
form." The two further quotes for 'thisness' being: 1837 Whewell Hist
Induct Sc 1857 I 244: "Which his school called ‘HAECcceity’ – from the
feminine form of the demonstrative masculine ‘hic,’ in Roman, neutre ‘hoc’
(Scotus uses the femine because ‘-ity- is a feminine ending) -- or ‘thisness.’",
and 1895 Rashdall Universities II 532: "An individuating form called by
the later Scotists its ‘haecceitas’ or its `thisness'"). "The investing of the content, which is in Bradleian language a `what', with self-existent reality or ‘that-ness'." Athenaeum 24 Dec. 1904 868/2. -- OED, 'thatness'. Trudgill writes in _The Dialects of England_
(Oxford: Blackwell), that Grice would often consult (he was from Harborne and
had a special interest in this – “I seem to have lost my dialect when I moved
to Corpus.” The 'this'-'that' demonstrative system is a two-way system which
distinguishes between things which are distant and things which are near.
Interestingly, however, a number of traditional dialects in England (if not
Oxford) differ from this system in having what Grice called a Griceian _three_-way
distinction. The Yorkshire dialect, for example, has ‘this’ (sing., near),
‘thir’ (pl. near), ‘that’ (sing. Medial) ‘tho’ (plural, medial), thon (sing.
distal) and ‘thon’ (pl., distal). The Mercian Anglian dialect has ‘these’
(sing. near), ‘theys’ (plural, near), ‘that’ (sing. medial), ‘they’ (pl.,
medial), ‘thik’ (sing./pl., distal). “The northern dialect is better in that it
distinguishes between the singular and the plural form for the distal, unlike
the southern dialect which has ‘thik’ for either.” Grice. Still, Grice likes
the sound of ‘thik’ and quotes from his friend M. Wakelin, _The Southwest of England_.
"When I awoke one May day morn/I found an urge within me born/To see the
beauteous countryside/That's all round wher'I do bide./So I set out wi' dog
& stick,/ My head were just a trifle thick./But good ole' fresh air had his
say/& blowed thik trouble clean away." -- B. Green, in _The Dorset
Year Book_. Dorset: Society of Dorset Men. “Some like Russell, but Bradley’s MY
man.” – H. P. Grice: Grice: "Russell is
pretentious; Bradley, an English angel, is not!" "Bradley can use 'thatness' freely; Russell uses it after
Bradley and artificially."
all the rest of the
watery bulk : but return back those few drops from whence they were
taken, and the glass-full that even now had an individuation by itself,
loseth that, and groweth one and the same with the other main stock : yet
if you fill your glass again, wheresoever you take it up, so it be
of the same uniform bulk of water you had before, it is the same glassfuU
of water that you had. But as I said before, this example fitteth
entirely no more than the other did. In such abstracted speculations,
where we must consider matter without form, (which hath no actual being,)
we must not expect adequated examples in nature. But enough is said to
make a speculative man see, that if God should join the soul of a
lately dead man, (even whilst his dead corpse should lie en- tire in his
windingsheet here,) unto a body made of earth, taken from some mountain
in America; it were most true and certain, that the body he should then
live by, were the same identical body he lived with before his death, and
late resurrection. It is evident, that sameness, thisness, and
that- ness, belongeth not to matter by itself, (for a general
indiffer- ence runneth through it all,) but only as it is distinguished
and individuated by the form. Which in our case, whensoever the
same soul doth, it must be understood always to be the same matter and
body.” (Browne, 1643). Grice. Corbin says that English is such a
plastic language, “unlike Roman,” but then there’s haec, and hæcceitas -- Duns
Scotus, J., Scottish Franciscan metaphysician and philosophical theologian. He
lectured at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne, where he died and his remains are still
venerated. Modifying Avicenna’s conception of metaphysics as the science of
being qua being, but univocally conceived, Duns Scotus showed its goal was to
demonstrate God as the Infinite Being revealed to Moses as the “I am who am”,
whose creative will is the source of the world’s contingency. Out of love God
fashioned each creature with a unique “haecceity” or particularity formally
distinct from its individualized nature. Descriptively identical with others of
its kind, this nature, conceived in abstraction from haecceity, is both objectively
real and potentially universal, and provides the basis for scientific knowledge
that Peirce calls “Scotistic realism.” Duns Scotus brought many of Augustine’s
insights, treasured by his Franciscan predecessors, into the mainstream of the
Aristotelianism of his day. Their notion of the will’s “supersufficient
potentiality” for self-determination he showed can be reconciled with
Aristotle’s notion of an “active potency,” if one rejects the controDuhem
thesis Duns Scotus, John 247 247
versial principle that “whatever is moved is moved by another.” Paradoxically,
Aristotle’s criteria for rational and non-rational potencies prove the
rationality of the will, not the intellect, for he claimed that only rational
faculties are able to act in opposite ways and are thus the source of
creativity in the arts. If so, then intellect, with but one mode of acting
determined by objective evidence, is non-rational, and so is classed with
active potencies called collectively “nature.” Only the will, acting “with
reason,” is free to will or nill this or that. Thus “nature” and “will”
represent Duns Scotus’s primary division of active potencies, corresponding
roughly to Aristotle’s dichotomy of non-rational and rational. Original too is
his development of Anselm’s distinction of the will’s twofold inclination or
“affection”: one for the advantageous, the other for justice. The first endows
the will with an “intellectual appetite” for happiness and actualization of
self or species; the second supplies the will’s specific difference from other
natural appetites, giving it an innate desire to love goods objectively
according to their intrinsic worth. Guided by right reason, this “affection for
justice” inclines the will to act ethically, giving it a congenital freedom
from the need always to seek the advantageous. Both natural affections can be
supernaturalized, the “affection for justice” by charity, inclining us to love
God above all and for his own sake; the affection for the advantageous by the
virtue of hope, inclining us to love God as our ultimate good and future source
of beatitude. Another influential psychological theory is that of intuitive
intellectual cognition, or the simple, non-judgmental awareness of a
hereand-now existential situation. First developed as a necessary theological
condition for the face-toface vision of God in the next life, intellectual
intuition is needed to explain our certainty of primary contingent truths, such
as “I think,” “I choose,” etc., and our awareness of existence. Unlike Ockham,
Duns Scotus never made intellectual intuition the basis for his epistemology,
nor believed it puts one in direct contact with any extramental substance
material or spiritual, for in this life, at least, our intellect works through
the sensory imagination. Intellectual intuition seems to be that indistinct
peripheral aura associated with each direct sensory-intellectual cognition. We
know of it explicitly only in retrospect when we consider the necessary
conditions for intellectual memory. It continued to be a topic of discussion
and dispute down to the time of Calvin, who, influenced by the Scotist John
Major, used an auditory rather than a visual sense model of intellectual
intuition to explain our “experience of God.”
haecceity from Latin haec, ‘this’, 1 loosely, thisness; more
specifically, an irreducible category of being, the fundamental actuality of an
existent entity; or 2 an individual essence, a property an object has
necessarily, without which it would not be or would cease to exist as the
individual it is, and which, necessarily, no other object has. There are in the
history of philosophy two distinct concepts of haecceity. The idea originated
with the work of the thirteenthcentury philosopher Duns Scotus, and was
discussed in the same period by Aquinas, as a positive perfection that serves
as a primitive existence and individuation principle for concrete existents. In
the seventeenth century Leibniz transformed the concept of haecceity, which
Duns Scotus had explicitly denied to be a form or universal, into the notion of
an individual essence, a distinctive nature or set of necessary characteristics
uniquely identifying it under the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Duns
Scotus’s haecceitas applies only to the being of contingently existent entities
in the actual world, but Leibniz extends the principle to individuate
particular things not only through the changes they may undergo in the actual
world, but in any alternative logically possible world. Leibniz admitted as a
consequence the controversial thesis that every object by virtue of its
haecceity has each of its properties essentially or necessarily, so that only
the counterparts of individuals can inhabit distinct logically possible worlds.
A further corollary since the possession
of particular parts in a particular arrangement is also a property and hence
involved in the individual essence of any complex object is the doctrine of mereological essentialism:
every composite is necessarily constituted by a particular configuration of
particular proper parts, and loses its self-identity if any parts are removed
or replaced. Grice was more familiar with the thatness than the thisness
(“Having had to read Bradley for my metaphysics paper!”).
haeckel: an impassioned adherent of Darwin’s
theory of evolution. His wrote “Die Welträtsel,” which became a best-seller and
was very influential in its time. Lenin is said to have admired it. Haeckel’s
philosophy, which he called monism, is characterized negatively by his
rejection of free will, immortality, and theism, as well as his criticisms of
the traditional forms of materialism and idealism. Positively it is
distinguished by passionate arguments for the fundamental unity of organic and
inorganic nature and a form of pantheism.
hales: from Alexander of
Hales. Grice called William of Occam “Occam,” William of Sherwood, “Shyrewood,”
and Alexander of Hales “Hales,” – why, I wish people would call me “Harborne,”
and not Grice!” – Grice. English Franciscan theologian, known as the Doctor
Irrefragabilis. The first to teach theology by lecturing on the Sentences of
Peter Lombard, Alexander’s emphasis on speculative theology initiated the
golden age of Scholasticism. Alexander wrote commentaries on the Psalms and the
Gospels; his chief works include his Glossa in quattuor libros sententiarum,
Quaestiones disputatatae antequam esset frater, and Quaestiones quodlibetales.
Alexander did not complete the Summa fratris Alexandri; Pope Alexander IV
ordered the Franciscans to complete the Summa Halesiana in 1255. Master of
theology in 1222, Alexander played an important role in the history of Paris,
writing parts of Gregory IX’s Parens scientiarum 1231. He also helped negotiate
the peace between England and France. He gave up his position as canon of
Lichfield and archdeacon of Coventry to become a Franciscan, the first
Franciscan master of theology; his was the original Franciscan chair of
theology at Paris. Among the Franciscans, his most prominent disciples include
St. Bonaventure, Richard Rufus of Cornwall, and John of La Rochelle, to whom he
resigned his chair in theology near the end of his life.
ha-levi, philosopher. His philosophy introduces
Arabic forms in Hebrew religious expression. He was traveling to Jerusalem on a
pilgrimage when he died. His most important philosophical work is Kuzari: The
Book of Proof and Argument of the Despised Faith, which purports to be a
discussion of a Christian, a Muslim, and a Jew, each offering the king of the
Khazars in southern Russia reasons for adopting his faith. Around 740 the
historical king and most of his people converted to Judaism. HaLevi presents
the Christian and the Muslim as Aristotelian thinkers, who fail to convince the
king. The Jewish spokesman begins by asserting his belief in the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of history who is continuously active in
history, rather than the God of the philosophers. Jewish history is the inner
core of world history. From the revelation at Sinai, the most witnessed divine
event claimed by any religion, the Providential history of the Jews is the way
God has chosen to make his message clear to all humankind. Ha-Levi’s view is
the classical expression of Jewish particularism and nationalism. His ideas
have been influential in Judaism and were early printed in Latin and Grecian.
hamann: philosopher. Born
and educated in Königsberg, Hamann, known as the Magus of the North, was one of
the most important Christian thinkers in G.y during the second half of the
eighteenth century. Advocating an irrationalistic theory of faith inspired by
Hume, he opposed the prevailing Enlightenment philosophy. He was a mentor of
the Sturm und Drang literary movement and had a significant influence on
Jacobi, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. As a close acquaintance of Kant, he also had a
great impact on the development of Kant’s critical philosophy through his Hume
translations. Hamann’s most important works, criticized and admired for their
difficult and obscure style, were the Socratic Memorabilia 1759, “Aesthetica in
nuce” and several works on language. He suppressed his “metacritical” writings
out of respect for Kant. However, they were published after his death and now
constitute the bestknown part of his work.
hamilton: “Hamilton and I
have many things in common: he went to Balliol, I went to Corpus – but we both
have a BA and a MA Lit. Hum.” – H. P. Grice. philosopher, educated at Oxford, he was for
most of his life professor at the of
Edinburgh 182156. Though hardly an orthodox or uncritical follower of Reid and
Stewart, he became one of the most important members of the school of Scottish
common sense philosophy. His “philosophy of the conditioned” has a somewhat
Kantian flavor. Like Kant, he held that we can have knowledge only of “the
relative manifestations of an existence, which in itself it is our highest
wisdom to recogHaeckel, Ernst Hamilton, William 360 AM
360 nize as beyond the reach of philosophy.” Unlike Kant, however, he
argued for the position of a “natural realism” in the Reidian tradition. The
doctrine of the relativity of knowledge has seemed to many including J. S. Mill contradictory to his realism. For Hamilton,
the two are held together by a kind of intuitionism that emphasizes certain facts
of consciousness that are both primitive and incomprehensible. They are, though
constitutive of knowledge, “less forms of cognitions than of beliefs.” In logic
he argued for a doctrine involving quantification of predicates and the view
that propositions can be reduced to equations.
hampshireism: His second wife was from the New World. His first wife
wasn’t. He married Renée Orde-Lees, the daughter of the very English Thomas
Orde-Lees, in 1961, and had two children, a son, Julian, and a daughter. To add
to the philosophers’ mistakes. There’s Austin (in “Plea for Excuses” and “Other
Minds”), Strawson (in “Truth” and “Introduction to Logical Theory,” and “On
referring”), Hart (in conversation, on ‘carefully,”), Hare (“To say ‘x is good’
is to recommend x”) and Hampshire (“Intention and certainty”). For Grice, the
certainty is merely implicated and on occasion, only. Cited by Grice as a member of the play group.
Hampshire would dine once a week with Grice. He would discuss and find very
amusing to discuss with Grice on post-war Oxford philosophy. Unlike Grice,
Hampshire attended Austin’s Thursday evening meetings at All Souls. Grice wrote
“Intention and uncertainty” in part as a response to Hampshire and Hart,
Intention and certainty. But Grice brought the issue back to an earlier
generation, to a polemic between Stout (who held a certainty-based view) and
Prichard.
hare: r. m. cited by H.
P. Grice, “Hare’s neustrics”. b.9, English philosopher who is one of the most
influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century and the developer of
prescriptivism in metaethics. Hare was educated at Rugby and Oxford, then
served in the British army during World War II and spent years as a prisoner of
war in Burma. In 7 he took a position at Balliol and was appointed White’s Professor of Moral
Philosophy at the of Oxford in 6. On
retirement from Oxford, he became Graduate Research Professor at the of Florida 393. His major books are Language
of Morals 3, Freedom and Reason 3, Moral Thinking 1, and Sorting Out Ethics 7.
Many collections of his essays have also appeared, and a collection of other
leading philosophers’ articles on his work was published in 8 Hare and Critics,
eds. Seanor and Fotion. According to Hare, a careful exploration of the nature
of our moral concepts reveals that nonironic judgments about what one morally
ought to do are expressions of the will, or commitments to act, that are
subject to certain logical constraints. Because moral judgments are
prescriptive, we cannot sincerely subscribe to them while refusing to comply
with them in the relevant circumstances. Because moral judgments are universal
prescriptions, we cannot sincerely subscribe to them unless we are willing for
them to be followed were we in other people’s positions with their preferences.
Hare later contended that vividly to imagine ourselves completely in other
people’s positions involves our acquiring preferences about what should happen
to us in those positions that mirror exactly what those people now want for
themselves. So, ideally, we decide on a universal prescription on the basis of
not only our existing preferences about the actual situation but also the new
preferences we would have if we were wholly in other people’s positions. What
we can prescribe universally is what maximizes net satisfaction of this
amalgamated set of preferences. Hence, Hare concluded that his theory of moral
judgment leads to preference-satisfaction act utilitarianism. However, like
most other utilitarians, he argued that the best way to maximize utility is to
have, and generally to act on, certain not directly utilitarian dispositions such as dispositions not to hurt others or
steal, to keep promises and tell the truth, to take special responsibility for
one’s own family, and so on.
harris: philosopher of language – classical. Grice adored him, and
he was quite happy that few knew about Harris! Cf. Tooke. Cf. Priestley and
Hartley – all pre-Griceian philosohers of language that are somehow outside the
canon, when they shouldn’t. They are very Old World, and it’s the influence of
the New World that has made them sort of disappear! That’s what Grice said!
hart: h. l. a. – cited
by Grice, “Hare on ‘carefully.’ Philosopher of European ancestry born in
Yorkshire, principally responsible for the revival of legal and political
philosophy after World War II. After wartime work with military intelligence,
Hart gave up a flourishing law practice to join the Oxford faculty, where he
was a brilliant lecturer, a sympathetic and insightful critic, and a generous
mentor to many scholars. Like the earlier “legal positivists” Bentham and John
Austin, Hart accepted the “separation of law and morals”: moral standards can
deliberately be incorporated in law, but there is no automatic or necessary
connection between law and sound moral principles. In The Concept of Law 1 he
critiqued the Bentham-Austin notion that laws are orders backed by threats from
a political community’s “sovereign” some
person or persons who enjoy habitual obedience and are habitually obedient to
no other human and developed the more
complex idea that law is a “union of primary and secondary rules.” Hart agreed
that a legal system must contain some “obligation-imposing” “primary” rules,
restricting freedom. But he showed that law also includes independent
“power-conferring” rules that facilitate choice, and he demonstrated that a
legal system requires “secondary” rules that create public offices and
authorize official action, such as legislation and adjudication, as well as
“rules of recognition” that determine which other rules are valid in the
system. Hart held that rules of law are “open-textured,” with a core of
determinate meaning and a fringe of indeterminate meaning, and thus capable of
answering some but not all legal questions that can arise. He doubted courts’
claims to discover law’s meaning when reasonable competing interpretations are
available, and held that courts decide such “hard cases” by first performing
the important “legislative” function of filling gaps in the law. Hart’s first
book was an influential study with A. M. Honoré of Causation in the Law 9. His
inaugural lecture as Professor of Jurisprudence, “Definition and Theory in
Jurisprudence” 3, initiated a career-long study of rights, reflected also in
Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory 2 and in
Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy 3. He defended liberal public policies.
In Law, Liberty and Morality 3 he refuted Lord Devlin’s contention that a
society justifiably enforces the code of its moral majority, whatever it might
be. In The Morality of the Criminal Law 5 and in Punishment and Responsibility
8, Hart contributed substantially to both analytic and normative theories of
crime and punishment.
Hartley, British philosopher. Although the
notion of association of ideas is ancient, he is generally regarded as the
founder of associationism as a self-sufficient psychology. Despite similarities
between his association psychology and Hume’s, Hartley developed his system
independently, acknowledging only the writings of clergyman John Gay 1699 1745.
Hartley was one of many Enlightenment thinkers aspiring to be “Newtons of the
mind,” in Peter Gay’s phrase. In Hartley, this took the form of uniting
association philosophy with physiology, a project later brought to fruition by
Bain. His major work, Observations on Man 1749, pictured mental events and
neural events as operating on parallel tracks in which neural events cause
mental events. On the mental side, Hartley distinguished like Hume between
sensation and idea. On the physiological side, Hartley adopted Newton’s
conception of nervous transmission by vibrations of a fine granular substance
within nerve-tubes. Vibrations within sensory nerves peripheral to the brain
corresponded to the sensations they caused, while small vibrations in the
brain, vibratiuncles, corresponded to ideas. Hartley proposed a single law of
association, contiguity modified by frequency, which took two forms, one for
the mental side and one for the neural: ideas, or vibratiuncles, occurring
together regularly become associated. Hartley distinguished between simultaneous
association, the link between ideas that occur at the same harmony,
preestablished Hartley, David 362
AM 362 moment, and successive
association, between ideas that closely succeed one another. Successive
associations occur only in a forward direction; there are no backward
associations, a thesis generating much controversy in the later experimental
study of memory.
Hartley, Joseph – philosopher. Hartmann: philosopher
who sought to synthesize the thought of Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. The
most important of his essays is “Philosophie des Unbewussten.” For Hartmann
both will and idea are interrelated and are expressions of an absolute
“thing-in-itself,” the unconscious. The unconscious is the active essence in
natural and psychic processes and is the teleological dynamic in organic life.
Paradoxically, he claimed that the teleology immanent in the world order and
the life process leads to insight into the irrationality of the “will-to-live.”
The maturation of rational consciousness would, he held, lead to the negation
of the total volitional process and the entire world process would cease. Ideas
indicate the “what” of existence and constitute, along with will and the
unconscious, the three modes of being. Despite its pessimism, this work enjoyed
considerable popularity. Hartmann was an unusual combination of speculative
idealist and philosopher of science defending vitalism and attacking
mechanistic materialism; his pessimistic ethics was part of a cosmic drama of
redemption. Some of his later works dealt with a critical form of Darwinism
that led him to adopt a positive evolutionary stance that undermined his
earlier pessimism. His general philosophical position was selfdescribed as
“transcendental realism.” His Philosophy of the Unconscious was tr. into
English by W. C. Coupland in three volumes in 4. There is little doubt that his
metaphysics of the unconscious prepared the way for Freud’s later theory of the
unconscious mind.
hartmann, n. philosopher (“Not to be
confused with Hartmann – but then neither am I to be confused with [G. R.]
Grice.” – Grice. He taught at the universities of Marburg, Cologne, Berlin, and
Göttingen, and wrote more than a dozen major works on the history of
philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. A realist in
epistemology and ontology, Hartmann held that cognition is the apprehension of
something independent of the act of apprehension or any other mental events. An
accurate phenomenology, such as Husserl’s, would acknowledge, according to him,
that we apprehend not only particular, spatiotemporal objects, but also “ideal
objects,” “essences,” which Hartmann explicitly identified with Platonic Forms.
Among these are ethical values and the objects of mathematics and logic. Our
apprehension of values is emotional in character, as Scheler had held. This
point is compatible with their objectivity and their mindindependence, since
the emotions are just another mode of apprehension. The point applies, however,
only to ethical values. Aesthetic values are essentially subjective; they exist
only for the subject experiencing them. The number of ethical values is far
greater than usually supposed, nor are they derivable from a single fundamental
value. At best we only glimpse some of them, and even these may not be
simultaneously realizable. This explains and to some extent justifies the
existence of moral disagreement, between persons as well as between whole
cultures. Hartmann was most obviously influenced by Plato, Husserl, and
Scheler. But he was a major, original philosopher in his own right. He has
received less recognition than he deserves probably because his views were
quite different from those dominant in recent Anglo- philosophy or in recent
Continental philosophy. What is perhaps his most important work, Ethics, was
published in G. in 6, one year before Heidegger’s Being and Time, and appeared
in English in 2.
hartshorne: chief exponent of process philosophy. After
receiving the Ph.D. at Harvard in 3 he came under the influence of Whitehead,
and later, with Paul Weiss, edited The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce 135. In
The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation 4 Hartshorne argued that all
sensations are feelings on an affective continuum. These ideas were later
incorporated into a neoclassical metaphysic that is panpsychist,
indeterministic, and theistic. Nature is a theater of interactions among
ephemeral centers of creative activity, each of which becomes objectively
immortal in the memory of God. In Man’s Vision of God 1 Hartshorne chastised
philosophers for being insufficiently attentive to the varieties of theism. His
alternative, called dipolar theism, also defended in The Divine Hartmann,
Eduard von Hartshorne, Charles 363 AM 363 Relativity 8, pictures God as supremely
related to and perfectly responding to every actuality. The universe is God’s
body. The divine is, in different respects, infinite and finite, eternal and
temporal, necessary and contingent. Establishing God’s existence is a
metaphysical project, which Hartshorne characterizes in Creative Synthesis 0 as
the search for necessary truths about existence. The central element in his
cumulative case for God’s existence, called the global argument, is a modal
version of the ontological argument, which Hartshorne was instrumental in
rehabilitating in The Logic of Perfection 2 and Anselm’s Discovery 5. Creative
Synthesis also articulated the theory that aesthetic values are the most
universal and that beauty is a mean between the twin extremes of order/disorder
and simplicity/complexity. The Zero Fallacy 7, Hartshorne’s twentieth book,
summarized his assessment of the history of philosophy also found in Insights and Oversights of
Great Thinkers 3 and Creativity in
Philosophy 4 and introduced
important refinements of his metaphysics.
hazzing: under conjunctum, we see that the terminology is varied.
There is the copulatum. But Grice prefers to restrict to use of the copulatum
to izzing and hazzing. Oddly Grice sees hazzing as a predicate which he
formalizes as Hxy. To be read x hazzes y, although sometimes he uses ‘x hazz
y.’ Vide ‘accidentia.’ For Grice the role of métier is basic since it shows
finality in nature. Homo sapiens, qua pirot, is to be rational.
hedonism, the view that
pleasure including the absence of pain is the sole intrinsic good in life. The
hedonist may hold that, questions of morality aside, persons inevitably do seek
pleasure psychological hedonism; that, questions of psychology aside, morally
we should seek pleasure ethical hedonism; or that we inevitably do, and ought
to, seek pleasure ethical and psychological hedonism combined. Psychological
hedonism itself admits of a variety of possible forms. One may hold, e.g., that
all motivation is based on the prospect of present or future pleasure. More
plausibly, some philosophers have held that all choices of future actions are
based on one’s presently taking greater pleasure in the thought of doing one
act rather than another. Still a third type of hedonism with roots in empirical psychology is that the attainment of pleasure is the
primary drive of a wide range of organisms including human beings and is
responsible, through some form of conditioning, for all acquired motivations.
Ethical hedonists may, but need not, appeal to some form of psychological hedonism
to buttress their case. For, at worst, the truth of some form of psychological
hedonism makes ethical hedonism empty or inescapable but not false. As a value theory a theory of
what is ultimately good, ethical hedonism has typically led to one or the other
of two conceptions of morally correct action. Both of these are expressions of
moral consequentialism in that they judge actions strictly by their
consequences. On standard formulations of utilitarianism, actions are judged by
the amount of pleasure they produce for all sentient beings; on some
formulations of egoist views, actions are judged by their consequences for
one’s own pleasure. Neither egoism nor utilitarianism, however, must be wedded
to a hedonistic value theory. A hedonistic value theory admits of a variety of
claims about the characteristic sources and types of pleasure. One contentious
issue has been what activities yield the greatest quantity of pleasure with prominent candidates including philosophical
and other forms of intellectual discourse, the contemplation of beauty, and
activities productive of “the pleasures of the senses.” Most philosophical
hedonists, despite the popular associations of the word, have not espoused
sensual pleasure. Another issue, famously raised by J. S. Mill, is whether such
different varieties of pleasure admit of differences of quality as well as
quantity. Even supposing them to be equal in quantity, can we say, e.g., that
the pleasures of intellectual activity are superior in quality to those of
watching sports on television? And if we do say such things, are we departing
from strict hedonism by introducing a value distinction not really based on
pleasure at all? Most philosophers have found hedonism both psychological and ethical exaggerated in its claims. One difficulty for
both sorts of hedonism is the hedonistic paradox, which may be put as follows.
Many of the deepest and best pleasures of life of love, of child rearing, of
work seem to come most often to those who are engaging in an activity for reasons
other than pleasure seeking. Hence, not only is it dubious that we always in
fact seek or value only pleasure, but also dubious that the best way to achieve
pleasure is to seek it. Another area of difficulty concerns happiness and its relation to pleasure. In the
tradition of Aristotle, happiness is broadly understood as something like
well-being and has been viewed, not implausibly, as a kind of natural end of
all human activities. But ‘happiness’ in this sense is broader than ‘pleasure’,
insofar as the latter designates a particular kind of feeling, whereas
‘well-being’ does not. Attributions of happiness, moreover, appear to be
normative in a way in which attributions of pleasure are not. It is thought
that a truly happy person has achieved, is achieving, or stands to achieve,
certain things respecting the “truly important” concerns of human life. Of
course, such achievements will characteristically produce pleasant feelings;
but, just as characteristically, they will involve states of active enjoyment
of activities where, as Aristotle first
pointed out, there are no distinctive feelings of pleasure apart from the doing
of the activity itself. In short, the Aristotelian thesis that happiness is the
natural end of all human activities, even if it is true, does not seem to lend
much support to hedonism psychological
or ethical.
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