On 2011-02-20, J.L.Speranza wrote:
> Grice mentions the many (12) beasts (betes noires,
> in French) but adds that they are ALL offspring (as it
> were) from Minimalism. And in "Reply to Richards" he
> provides an 'economical' argument against Minimalism _in
> toto_, rather than, alas, caring to deal with each bete
> noire independently.
Unfortunately PGRICE has been downgraded on Google books to snippet view, so I can't go back and look at this.
> --- I noted in my reply to Jones, elsewhere, that it's
> best to trace Grice's study ("Meaning") to his seminar
> material on Peirce.
I don't suppose there is anything online about this?
I found this:
Grice in the wake of Peirce
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
University of Helsinki
In which I discover Grice as an anti-psychologist (according to Pietarinen).
I had supposed Grice's talk about speaker's meaning, which seems to connect meaning with some mental act or event, to be a kind of psychologism.
But JL tells me:
> ... it is
> "Meaning" which attempts to reduce the 'semantic' to the
> psychological (via reductive rather than reductionist
> analysis).
So I am puzzled there about whether Grice's ideas about meaning were psychologistic.
Even if so there is possibly another reconciliation, apart from my attempt to differentiate the kinds of language at stake (ordinary versus formal scientific).
That is in the differences between semantics and meaning,
and between semantics and pragmatics.
In this I am tempted to say that Carnap's interest in semantics is primarily concerned with giving truth conditions to formal languages, and not concerned with explanation or even explication of the concept of "meaning".
And on the second point, that (as seems generally recognised) a large part of Grice's insights belong to pragmatics rather than semantics.
So now we have three differentiators on the table which might disarm possible conflict on semantics.
It seems to me that Grice comes closest to Carnap's concerns when he discusses "central meaning" (in his retrospective epilogue?), and in doing so closest to semantics, rather than pragmatics or in the analysis of "meaning" as a concept in ordinary language.
> It IS complex. Back in the day, Grice was THOUGHT as
> having providing the ultimate reduction of the
> 'semantic' to the psychological.
But perhaps we should not call this "semantic"?
> "This looks like tough ground for a constructive
> conversation but I think that when you think about the
> distinct interests of the two philosophers there is
> reason for the different attitudes, and possibilities
> for reconciliation appear. Frege's interest was
> specifically in the language of mathematics. Subsequent
> philosophers may have applied his ideas more widely, but
> Frege's anti-psychologism is to the best of my knowlege
> specific to the language of mathematics. It is
> mathematical concepts which he seeks to divest of the
> psychological elements which were common among
> mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics in his
> day. And in this he has been successful, almost all
> mathematicians today, and probably most philosophers
> have a completely non-psychological understanding of
> mathematical concepts."
>
> I would tend to think he was perhaps opposing, say, Mill,
> System of Logic. I've never read a more psychologist
> book than that! And of course, Mill thought that 2+2=4
> is syntethic a posteriori!
Mill certainly gets his attention, 18 mentions in the Grundlagen der Arithmetic.
> "Carnap's interest was in formal language for science,
> and the ideals of mathematical formulation and that of
> objectivity in science make the same kind of conception
> of semantics seem appropriate for languages in which
> scientific theories can be formalised. To this we might
> add, that these languages are intended for publication
> rather than discussion, they are not primarily spoken
> but written languages, and cannot depend upon the kind
> of contextual clues which may contribute significantly
> to oral discourse."
>
> This is ironic, in a sort of way, if one is reminded of
> the 'infamous' Vienna Circle. Apparently, they just
> gathered to TALK!
Yes. And Carnap's idea was that all philosophy was analytic and could be formalised.
But to understand this you have to distinguish a particular class of propositions which are the official doctrines of the discipline, and consider the metatheory to be specifically about those, and not about numerous other kinds of fact which the discipline deals with en passant (like who are the experts on particular topics and where they work, or discussions about methods, and a whole load of other things).
This is important for understanding the logicist thesis.
There are a lot of really wierd discussions which take place on FOM (for example) which involve completely unmathematical propositions which some mathematical logicians care about.
Also some mathematicians will tell you (and this may be most or even nearly all), that mathematics is mainly transmitted, taught, learned, discovered in (spoken) discussions between mathematicians, not through published literature or texts.
At the same time, there was at one time an apparent concensus that "the standard of proof" for mathematical propositions is provability in ZFC, even though exhibiting a formal proof is not required. You can sometimes see this kind of very precise criteria for what constitutes and established result in action. For example, Harvey Friedman, who is the principle proponent of the supplementation of ZFC by large cardinal axioms, is very careful (according to his own account) to describe a result which depends on a large cardinal axiom differently to one which can be proven in ZFC without large cardinals, and this he attributes to the editorial policy of the journals he publishes in.
>
> ---- Grice of course loved to TALK too. So there is a
> parallel between the unwritten, conversational,
> doctrines of the Vienna Circle (I never knew WHERE they
> met.
The difference is that he was interested in the informal conversation as subject matter, whereas the Circle were not,
and, at least in Carnap's case, he denied that his formal semantic methods were applicable to natural languages.
> A note about Grice's manoeuvres. I tend to think, and
> like to self-convince me about this, that the whole
> manoeuvre of the 'conversational implicature' was a
> technical point that Grice wanted to make about a
> certain outdated mode of doing philosophy.
Well that's certainly my impression, my very first impression on reading Grice was that he was addressing issues in the philosophy of Austin which I myself had found unsatisfactory.
> So, 'conversational implicature' is meant to
> elucidate an analysis of philosophical theses put
> forward by philosophers. He wasn't really, Grice wasn't,
> on the trivialities of "She hasn't been to prison yet".
> Rather, on say, why 'material implication' doesn't do,
> in Strawson's view, to mirror the behaviour of 'if'.
But surely the reason why one has to go into conversational implicature to elucidate the analysis is that the analysis is itself primarily an analysis of ordinary language?
The problems (from a certain point of view!) with ordinary language philosophy of the kind from which Grice was departing were of (at least) two distinct kinds.
The first kind, which are the ones which Grice was principally addressing were that as an analysis of ordinary language it was just wrong.
Some of the most glaring issues of this kind seem to originate with Wittgenstein, who seemed to think that if something was too obvious for anyone ever to say it then it couldn't be true.
When Grice sorts these out, he is slightly removed from the idiocy, for he really is sorting out philosophical mistakes rather than promulgating falsehoods about ordinary language.
(and of course, less idiotic, because closer to the truth).
But there is no point in doing this if the original philosophical investigations were not just wrong, but misdirected. If the entire enterprise was a misdirection of philosophical talent, then a fine-grained corrective analysis is equally misdirected.
Against this kind of critique Grice responds to defend the enterprise. As you would expect, a detailed critique betokens an acceptance of the general conception of philosophy, though it doesn't mean an agreement on which are the important problems to address within that conception.
> It is LINGUISTS and other scientists (so-called) -- e.g.
> psycholinguists, ethnomethodologists of conversation,
> etc. -- which naturally focus on what Grice's theory is
> obviosuly about. But recall that for Grice, the point
> was in the application. The fun, he said in "Further
> notes", not in the WoW reprint, is when one cashes out
> implicature for its philosophical price, as it were.
And what is its philosophical price?
Austin too writes as if the analysis of language were a preliminary to something more important, but leaves one wondering whether life is long enough to reach these applications.
I do think that Grice does put on a better impression of desiring to address some real philosophical problems.
On the Kripke stuff I think I will come back later, when I have something more substantial to offer.
Roger Jones
No comments:
Post a Comment