By Roger Bishop Jones, for The City of Eternal Truth
In the Grice Club Speranza has been talking about deconstructionism, and the discussion connects with the reasons for a recent pause in my attention to the Carnap/Grice conversation and the road to The City.
"The conversation" is an exercise in comparative analysis, in which we seek an understanding by each philosopher of the view of the other, and hope to discover substantial "sub-theories" of the ideas of each philosophy which are compatible and can provide a basis on which they could have built together.
To move forward in this enterprise I have to have straight in my head a method of comparative analysis which is capable of achieving such a reconciliation.
I had come to believe that such a method might be arrived at by some further development of my earlier conception of "X-Logic", itself a formal method, and of an informal version suitable for earlier stages in an analysis which might ultimately be formalised.
This squares with the idea which I put forward to The Grice Club that certain aspects of deconstructionism should be taken seriously in the articulation of methods for rational re-construction, so that pathologies in the target of analysis are fully explicated rather than glossed over, and can be focussed on in the analysis.
This is all rather ethereal perhaps, and will have to be articulated and illustrated more thoroughly, but perhaps give some idea why I think that progress on the Conversation depends for my part on progressing a new version of X-Logic, and on an account of how one can achieve similar effects in the first place by less formal means.
RBJ
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Good. I like your point. In the Grice Club, I related this with Strawson's view of Grice as very diffident chap. And the reason seems obvious.
ReplyDeleteGrice LOVED to deconstruct other people's incoherences.
But, Strawson suggests: the end result was tragic: Grice was never sure that his own views would NOT be subjected to the same deconstructionalist spirit.
For the record, this mention of the deconstructionist doctrine arose from some serendipity googling on my part. I was looking for references on Ryle's review of Heidegger 1929, and there is this author, -- I believe his book is called "Philosophical Conversation", where he calls Ryle the first deconstructionist. THIS vis a vis Ryle's very superficial remark that Heidegger had challenged the orthodox categories of thinking.
So this deconstructionist author was suggesting that the Role of deconstruction is to provide a critical analysis of or approach to some categories. When they are categories of an existing material, is de-construction at a very metaphysical level. Not deconstruction of a TEXT, but deconstruction of the categories themselves.
This we later related with R. B. Jones to the metaphysical enterprise as being 'constructivist' -- and for which I was able to find Grice's point exactly overlapping with Jones, that metaphysics is about either CONSTRUCTING (when it's ab-initio) or 'reconstructing' proper, when it is either 'descriptive' OR 'revisionary' (vis a vis ordinary language). In this connection, Carnap's frequent use of "Rational Rekonstruktion" was also mentioned. To which, we may now add, Grice's and Carnap's point about "LOGICAL" constructions -- of 'personal identity' in Grice, or 'material' objects from 'sense data' (perhaps), in Carnap. Etc.