Roger Bishop Jones is doing some excellent job. In "Strand 5" for the Grice Club he proposed some 'correspondence rules', as it were, to read Grice via Carnap, and vice versa.
That is precisely what we need.
--- It sounds exaggerating, but it may not be.
Grice considered changes of idioms as pressing and topical when it came to the "longitudinal unity of philosophy". I.e. how to make sense of Locke's rather florid prose (hey!) in terms of mid-twentieth century philosophy, as when Grice was writing?
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Yet, he is optimistic: he sees that while the idioms change, the topics remain. And that the change of idiom is the easiest first thing to do.
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What does Jones propose.
Well,
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There is "meaning". Qua noun. As when we say, "the meaning of this". Here Carnap uses "Sinn". Recall that his mother tongue was German. Grice prefers the verb, '... means ...'. Is this the 'sense'? We don't think so. For Grice there is indeed more to meaning than sense. This is not just the chiffchaff, the peripheral meaning. Even within 'sense' we need some caveats.
There's Grice's "implication". Does Carnap use anything like that? To refer to any 'connotation' that an expression carrying this or that 'Sinn' may ALSO carry into the bargain? We do not know. "Implikation" is not possibly a word he used.
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There's Pragmatik. Carnap used this, and it had been coined, well after Carnap's main developments on this, by C. W. Morris. Does Grice use 'pragmatic'? Yes, as we point out in CarnapGrice pfd [by JonesSperanza], Strand 6, Grice says, is concerned with what he then calls the logical-pragmatic distinction, as applied to 'inference'.
---- As for the 'intension' of "pragmatic", it is best to stick with Morris's ideal which is maintained by Carnap (Intro. to Semantics): pragmatic is that branch of semeiotic that refers to the relation between a sign and its user. Is this what Grice has in mind? We think so.
Then there's truth-conditions. Both Carnap and Grice here use the correct terms. Carnap uses "Warheit", which is the abstract term for Truth. But he is well aware of the developments of logicism, so he can use the German expressios for 'truth-value', that Grice uses, 'truth-function', that Grice uses, and 'truth-condition' (that Wittgenstein used).
Psychological attitude. Does Carnap use anything like this? He refers to 'belief'. Recall that Carnap had ceased to be a German-language philosopher to become an English-language one. What would 'belief' be in German? "Glauben" is to believe. Does German allow for the richness of formations that Grice can play with this here: 'to accept', 'to judge', 'to believe', 'to will', 'to intend'. There is the bread and butter for Grice. What is the bread and butter for Carnap?
"connective". This was a topic for Grice. What does Carnap say about this? Here, strictly, a connective is a truth-functional dyadic operator. Does Carnap ever consider the amalgams and the counterparts in German for them?
I propose:
'conjunktion' --- "und"
'disjunktion' --- "oder"
'conditional' --- "ob"
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What about 'all' and 'some'. Do they carry the same implicatures in German.
'universal quantifier' -- "alle"
'existential quantifier' --- "nicht alle"?
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What about the iota operator:
ix ---- "der". Does Carnap ever consider that while 'the' (which obsessed Russell -- the king of France is bald) translates as 'der', 'die' and 'das' in German? Does this matter for the introduction of 'identity'?
"ethics" -- Carnap's world is a factual world. He inherited from Witters the idea that 'value' issues are not the concern of the philosopher. But Grice is ALWAYS talking 'value'.
---- Etc.
But do not despair! There IS a common ground.
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I agree that this is a very promising line of discussion and I think it may be ground on which we could actually initiate a dialogue in a style suitable for "the conversation".
ReplyDeleteThe sylistic point here is just that we want something more like a Platonic dialogue than an internet discussion, the former being the kind of discussion one really could have verbally person to person, so you have to do it in smaller pieces.
I think there is a substantial amount of dialogue necessary to reconcile Grice and Carnap here, not so much because of there really being a large chasm between them, but because of apparent misunderstanding of what these demons are in Carnap's philosophy.
One aspect of this is that we see Grice here as being intolerant of intolerance, but we also see very little intolerance, at least in the later Carnap. Carnap makes proposals rather than prescriptions, and his pluralism means that these proposals are not exclusive, He does not undervalue values, though they do not loom large in his philosophy. Earlier we could say there was a disagreement about the scope of philosophy, but later Carnap withdrew from any position on the scope of philosophy.
As of this moment I know of no point on which Grice appears in his daemons or elsewhere to be disagreeing with Carnap, in relation to which I am myself convinced that there is a substantive disagreement (rather than a verbal one, or some other kind of resolvable difference). This particularly applies if we do consistently interpret the daemons as descriptions of intolerant dogmas.
RBJ
Yes -- the daemons as dogmas seems like a good approach.
ReplyDeleteRecall that Grice made it easy for us -- No, I don't think he is having CARNAP as holder of the daemons --, in thinking the 12 of them reduce to just one: MINIMALISM.
Surely one would NOT want to call Carnap a 'minimalist': his pluralism and prescriptionism is just anything minimalism does not stand for. On the other hand, we have explored each of the monsters in some detail and we do want to play with them a bit.
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So perhaps the points here is between early Carnap and later Carnap, but as you say, the only important one is the Later Carnap.
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In which case, for each daemon, seen as a dogma, the problem seems to be that the anti-daemon is ALSO a dogma. For "Verificationism", for example. If a daemon (a sort of minimalism), what would the anti-dogma be? A position that holds that there's more to meaning than truth-condition. We know Grice would not accept that (for him central meaning is alethic). So, is he thinking of 'evidentialism', or what? Intuitionism as opposed to 'verificationism'?
It seems he underdescribes the monsters in that he does not realise that to fight a monster you need another one.
I suppose he sees himself as David fighting Goliath with just the slingshot of wit, but that may not do.
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So, we should be able to use a few symbols here.
Call "M" minimalism, so that M1 is a minimalist thesis. Then we would have an anti-M1: an anti-minimalist thesis (covering the same phenomenon) and see where that should lead us.
In this header, I was really interested in a very short sort of glossary as a
"Carnap-Grice dictionary" -- "Grice-Carnap dictionary"
"intension" -- "sense" in Grice's sense (vide his "Do not multiply senses beyond necessity").
"pragmatics" -- in Carnap --> "semantics" in Grice and so on.
Slithtly provocative, but to think if there is an agreement BEYOND the idiom, and the need to look, should the need arise, for a common idiom that would have pleased both. Etc.