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Jones is mainly responsible for Chapter 2. I have a say in Chapter 3.
I follow Jones in being Sellars/Yeatman. These historians of England are prone of using the form:
"... was the cause of ..."
E.g. The Zulu war: Cause of the Zulu War: the Zulus.
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So, we should give proper consideration to this idea that Grice was the effect of Carnap.
Allow us to explain.
Everyone who reads a manual of 20th century philosophy -- as an undergraduate I was fascinated by such manuals and soon enough got wedded to Austin and his school -- knows that 'post-war Oxford philosophy', due to the bad influence of Ayer, had turned its efforts to "NATURAL" language, like English, 'ordinary language'.
HAD CARNAP NOT TAKEN The formalist approach seriously -- in his influential books of the 1930s and 1940s, Austin and Grice, in the postwar period -- they led the 'school' -- would never have gotten so 'enthusiastic' about it.
It was a slogan. "We care for ordinary language here". Implicating: not for what people like Carnap CALL 'language' but isn't ('formal language').
Oxford always had an anti-Cantabrigensis strand. They couldn't just cope with Whitehead/Russell's Principia Mathematica. Anyone familiar with the history of logic in Oxford in the 20th century (starting with J. C. Wilson, Statement and Inference) notes that formalism never set foot, or got anchored in the dreaming spires.
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So, indeed Carnap was the cause of Grice.
--- But the more one learns of Grice, the more one detects his 'irreverent conservative' and REACTIONARY strand. He, among the Oxonians, was the one that DID want to play "Symbolo". He would NOT disregard 'formal language' as a Carnapian invention, but would rather look for the generalities. Things that could be said about BOTH formal languages AND natural languages. Things that could illuminate BOTH the ordinary-language philosopher (as they illuminated Strawson, who credits Grice in his vademecum of 'informal logic' (1952)) AND the formalist.
Alas, the Carnap-Quine interface was not running along smooth tracks, for Quine had close associations with the post-war Oxford movement. After a polemic with J. L. Austin of rather bitter overtones, Quine felt more at ease with Grice, and they would lecture together in Oxford (or rather Quine had a say as a visiting scholar).
So, with Quine in Oxford (who had learned it all from Carnap), Grice found fodder for his thoughts. For he could hold a conversation on natural language with someone who knew of "formal" "language".
By the death of Austin, ordinary-language philosophy was over. Logic had taken a firm place in all academic teaching and, more importantly, the newer generations noted that Austin had been incomparable. Nobody could have replaced him. The demise of Austin meant the demise of ordinary-language philosophy.
But Grice of course survived the 1960s, and this decade and half of the 1970s see him at his formal best.
It was circa 1978, mainly due to his close association with his former student Judith Baker, that he turned to other areas of philosophy, which, as he notes, were "less amenable" for the type of formalism he revelled in.
This is the 'rhetoric' Grice. The Grice of the florid prose. BUT ALWAYS accompanied by a reference or two to the days that formed him, and the FIGURE that helped form him more than anyone else: Austin.
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This is an interesting and illuminating story.
ReplyDeleteI shall certainly have to become better acquainted with Grice's formal side, of which I am completely ignorant (unless we count reading Code).
Both of them then (Carnap and Grice) were interested in the general theory of language, with Grice specially interested in the natural, and Carnap the formal.
Carnap saw formal languages as a route to greater rigour, to "scientific philosophy" and at least early on he would have counted the study of natural language as part of empirical science rather than philosophy.
I don't see that would necessarily have been a problem between them since Carnap engaged with other sciences anyway
I'm interested in probing then big issues here.
In relation to Carnap's central aims, I think it is Grice's work and view on rationality which might be most important, and its relationship to these questions about what kind of language to use for what purposes. In this Carnap was a kind of evangelist, he saw himself as working on things which would permit philosophy and science to be more rational than it has been (implicating that it isn't entirely rational? or at all?).
Is there any of this is Grice, or is his interest in rationality more "academic". Is Grice engaged in a peicemeal prophylactic, or is there a more constructive element?
On Quine, it seems to me that the extent of his endebtedness to Carnap is often overstated (even by Quine).
Quine cut his teeth on Principia, first undertaking an instructive extension which required a good practical understanding of at least half of the three volume work, and then reworking (simplifying) the whole thing for his PhD and reworking it all again before it was eventually published. He was already pretty far progressed in this before he met Carnap (the PhD was done), and then he spent just 6 weeks with Carnap at a good time to become well acquainted with LSL in draft. This is a far cry from an extended apprenticeship.
Carnap nevertheless played a substantial role (it seems to me) in shaping Quine's philosophy, rather in the manner that he shaped Oxford "ordinary language philosophy". They were both reactions against Carnap.
RBJ
Yes. We perhaps should lead Quine to his own devices. So we have a few points:
ReplyDeletei. Carnap and Grice (ALWAYS in that order) BOTH interested in 'language' as such -- with the two varieties: 'formal' for Carnap, first, and 'natural' for Grice second. I don't think Grice wants to say there is NOTHING formal language can do that natural language can do. So that may be a disagreement.
ii. No, I don't think he was into prophylactic. As an Oxford don, his bread and butter came from 'natural' language. He would not have necessarily cared to teach his students to first formalise things and then talk. Note his problems with 'but', which obsessed Frege. What is the contrast between 'but' and 'and'? Etc. So, Grice would have allowed 'and' to do the duty. No buts about it. No need to have "She was poor but she was honest" as symbolised, first, as "p & q" to be able to talk about the claims made.
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It may be that in the Philosophy that Carnap was familiar, debate of the type that thrives in the Oxford Debating Society was not his 'bill of fare', or fare of the day. The Germans have odd ways of arguing, in the natural language. The English Oxonians don't. They argue very peacemeal, as you say, very cleverly, and they don't necessarily need to formalise things to get the point across.
iii. So, why, you may wonder, got Grice ANY interest in formal language at all? I would think: to show the formalist that natural language IS like formal language. "Implicatures" just happen. They are bad, but they happen. But they are JUST implicatures. The problem with the formalist, Grice thought, was that because 'implicatures happen', they just give a rather hasty farewell to natural lingo -- and unable the Oxonian philosopher to shine at his best: the debate at the Oxford Philosophical Society, etc.