Strawson/Grice: The Descriptive/Revisionary Polemic

---- By J. L. S.
------- for the Grice Club

------ READERS OF THE PROCEEDINGS of 'The Grice Club' should not fear: Kramer and I are not disagreeing over the 'it' of 'it is raining'. We are looking for rationale. In my case, one of my main interests is historical. Incidentally, Chomsky delivered his lectures at Pisa, not Guatemala, as I said. Thus, he expands on pro-drop languages like, er, ... Italian. He sounds a bit too academic when discoursing to the Italians on all those rules and parameters ('rules' as he calls them) to then add, "Of course, you Italians, have no problem about this: it's all pro-drop". One wonders.

But my historical interest goes even more backward. To vintage 1954 (when Chomsky had not yet published "Syntactic Structures", and Strawson was fresh from London having published, for the posterity of English philosophy (Oxford philosophy, rather), his "Introduction" where he discusses 'it is raining'. I wanted to check with what Grice, a paleo-Grice, a neo-Grice, or a post-Grice (provided the latter is, at least, polite) would say on the issue.

Strawson was, of course, younger than Grice. This _is_ important. I once met an Irishman, Brendan Ward, actually, who I would often discuss books with. He once told me, when I mentioned this or that new novel. "Sorry, chap; I never read a book by someone who is younger than me". And one wonders:

(a) About Socrates: the time he spends with those teens is amazingly high for a philosopher of his stature.

(b) Simpliciter and analogously, the time Grice spent criticising his tutee is enough to be optimistic about 'academia'!

This is what Strawson writes on the weather. It's all about 'substantival expresson'. Strawson and Grice will spend a summer in Irvine in 1973 which was supposedly fun. And Strawson's "Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar" springs from that.

Back in 1954, he was writing:

What is a variable? Is it what Quine and Reichenbach would want us to think it is?

Nay!

"This will not do as it stands," writes Strawson.

"And for various reasons." The one that concerns us is what the has as "reason (iii)". The formalist approach

would, on the authority of some grammars,
force us to admit the 'it' of 'It is raining'
as an individual expression.

After all, in the system

'Fa' does entail

(Ex)Fx

but we do not [necessarily. JLS] wish to
say that 'It is raining' entails 'There is
at least one thing which is raining'

The system may, then, require a constraint. It may require that

in any sentence in which an
expression appears as a grammatical
subject of a predicate 'F', it should, in order to
count as an individual expression in that appearance, be a
possible [conversational. JLS] answer [or reply. JLS]
to a possible question of the form 'What (who) F?

Strawson is happy with that.

The deals with [the alleged problem-case
of 'It is raining']

for, he writes,

[T]here is no question *What is raining?'
to which 'It' is an answer.

But one doubts. I would conduct a survey. Kramer disqualifies in a way, people who say, 'the weather'. The problem here is what informants to use as they say. I would, would a straight face, even, go to the people "in-the-know", i.e. metereologists, especially in state-run television public channels or radio stations. "You said it was going to rain. What d'you mean, 'it'?" -- say you are Arne Naess or something.

Strawson did not care. He had already gotten his second at PPE and was safely teaching in Oxford. Even Grice did not care much. Grice's listing of 'formal devices' is meant as provocative (WoW:ii, -, &, v, ->, (x), (Ex), (ix) --), as an application of a manoeuvre he's set to 'destroy' or undermine. And he is definitely more interested in the 'formal device' than its vernacular counterpart. Would YOU say, (Ex), i.e. 'some' or 'at least one', if you really were interested in 'least'? This requires a special post in this here blog (sic), "The least Gricean", or something.

But Strawson was professionally uninterested. He wants to say that it is NO business of the philosopher to even TRY and formalise 'it is raining'. Forget about the Pisa Lectures by Chomsky.

Strawson writes, with charm:

'[I]t', in 'It is raining'
is, indeed, a substantival expression

--- I wonder that -- cfr. my remarks on 'zweck' elsewhere: 'zweck' is like tonk and plonk and plink. There's no 'commitment' as to what kind of an expression it is. In a pro-drop lingo like Italian, we don't say that 'piove' is _lacking_ a substantival expression, do we?

Strawson continues:

but when we do say 'It is
raining', we are notably notusing 'it'
to refer to something which we
then describe [or predicate of, or adposition] as "raining".

Instead of denying substantival expression-status to 'it' he proposes, rather, that

thus, not all grammatically substantival
expressions have a referring use

And yet another exception:

not alluses of substantival
expressions, like "it", which can be
used referringly, are referring uses.

While I do follow Strawson's charming intuitions there, the alternative, formalist, approach would be to deny that 'it' (in the 'weather' it) and the 'it' of "it is on the table, the book" are the same device -- logical or physical. But this may seem to multiply devices beyond necessity. And in any case, the formalism may fail to provide a rationale as to why we are dealing with these issues in the first place. At least the 'informalist' has a goal: to reconstruct 'valid inferences' in the vernacular -- and to do that we need some faith in there being some sort of mirroring between a formal system we may construct and the things we speak (or something).

Grice and Strawson polemicised over metaphysics: should it be descriptive or aim at revisionary? Or rather, the other way round: should it be just descriptive or aim to _revise_? Grice was never sure about this. Strawson was: the Aristotelian metaphysics (or physics, as Grice prefers) of substance and attribute is thus reflected, but imperfectly in grammar -- which remains a 'pretty good guide' (only) to logical form. Strawson puts it this way:

[F]rom the fact that something
can be referred to, no philosophical
[read: eschatological or metaphysical,
or ontological. JLS] conclusions follow
about its nature

In a fragment with which Kramer may agree, Strawson notes:

All that is shown is the existence of a linguistic need for a substantive.

I.e. Kramer's reminiscences of

Spot runs
See Spot run.

The lack of 'Spot' in a non-drop language like English would have the kindergartener think ('run?'. Is that an order?). As Kramer notes, with the new methodologies one is never sure the poor kindergartener will NOT be confused -- they have them running around instead of thinking logically. Ah well.