In theory the Speranza - Jones Carnap/Grice conversation project is spread across the three blogs (Carnap Corner, Grice Club and here), and the bit of the conversation which belongs here is the bit in which we extrapolate from the developments in the philosophies of Carnap and Grice which actually happened, via further evolution of a similar kind, to the realisation of a common conception of The City of Eternal Truth (or at least to mutually compatible conceptions).
So here is the latest diagram:
Excellent. The fact that the unpublications of both Carnap and Grice FILL cartons in the University of California (at Los Angeles in Carnap´s case, transported from Chicago, and at Berkeley in Grice´s case, transported from Oxford) helps.
ReplyDelete----
For Grice, the Eternal City has a diagram. It needs urban design. This is the METHODOLOGICAL bit. It also holds houses. These are the compartments, or the latitudinal wholes. The City is Philosophy Itself. So the harmony results from a sharing of
-- a method
and
-- a substance.
With tolerance, of course, for variants. Re: method. In which way there IS a ´method´ for philosophy that Carnap and Grice would share? Surely analysis. But analysis of what? And analysis under _what_ conditions?
The substantive offshots are ´licensed´ by the use of the method. A method is productive and open-ended. The results are historical embodiments of successful applications of the method.
--- Grice gets more and more of a constructivist, as time goes by. For him, method proceeds by hypostasis. Not hypothesis. In Carnap, there is the "ancilla scientiae" slogan that suggests a view of method connected more with hypothesis than hypostasis.
But that may be just a "nominal" divergence. When examined, the methodological ways are not so disonant. The one way proceeds via a rational examination of a thesis. And this, not so much against its rivals -- for that would be a mere gladiatorial approach that Carnap never endorsed (this Prinzip der Toleranz holding dear to his heart from a tender age) -- but on its own merits.
The boundaries of formal language (for Carnap) and ordinary language or natural language, or plain English (for Grice) need concern both Carnapians and Griceians. Carnapians may refer to the metalanguage freedom: English IS the recognised lingua franca to tolerate this or that linguistic framework.
With Grice, English features not just as the metalanguage of philosophical discussion, but the object of study per se. We have with him a close identification of what Aristotle would have as both the "formal" and the "material" object -- of philosophy. For it´s English that we are examining or elucidating, and we are doing it in English.
----- This idea is possibly to parochial to be true, and one should not air it so noisily. After all, philosophers are concerned with ´conceptual schemes´ only. But Grice is a progressive lip, as he knows, and it was Carnap who did most than any to bring this "linguistic" emphasis to the "revolution" that philosophy endured in the twentieth century.