Speranza
In "Quine and Carnap on Ontology," Jones writes:
"This is rather rambling, and what I say about Quine is speculative and probably not entirely correct, but I'm posting anyway. After complaining about Quine's "On What There is" being diametrically opposed to Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" (and I was thinking of it as the third in a triumvirate of Quinean oppositions to the core of Carnap's philosophy, the other two being the analytic/synthetic distinction and modal logic) the words "Ontological Relativity" popped up in my head, by way of reference to a contribution of Quine's in this area which I have never actually seen."
It is a good keyword: "Ontological Relativity". Thanks for reminding us about it.
Jones:
"I searched my little philosophical library and discovered that I really did not have a copy, and decided to have a look when next I visit the British Library.
(and also to get Code from PGRICE, no longer readable on google books, and the journal in which Grice on Aristotle appears). However, notwithstanding my never having read the paper, just the sight of a few lines of commentary suffices to change my perception of Quine on this topic. It seems that though "On What there is" seems contrary to Carnap, "Ontological Relativity", apart from being naturalistic rather than formalistic, is on the same lines as Carnap, i.e. it is relativistic; ontology is relative to language."
These are good points. From what I recall, this had an influence on Davidson. It is the point about the "Gavagai", etc. that Quine also develops in "Word and object". He was into defending this indeterminacy, as it were, at various levels. Ontological relativity, ontological indeterminacy? The issues are not exactly equivalent, but it may impinge on this: we say 'ontological relativity'. But how much of it is 'epistemic' indeterminacy? For a speaker S, of a language L, the things may be 'absolute' enough. It's only when someone, a metaphysician, say, tries to describe the ontology of L. He finds that various schemes are possibly. He infers, wrongly, that there is 'ontological relativity' involved.
Jones:
"That also makes it broadly similar I would guess, to Grice, for he had a relaxed liberal attitude to ontology, and one might perhaps think he allowed relativity to context not just language (which I'm sure the other two could be stretched to as well). It may be worth exploring this a little further for we are here saying something about absolute metaphysics, i.e. that ontology is not a part of it, ontological claims are supposed to be relative rather than absolute."
----- This reminds of a gem I once read: Warnock, "Metaphysics and Logic" (repr. in Flew). VERY GRICEIAN! (It is an OLD paper, dated 1950s, I think). But Warnock, like Grice, would like to be careful. He considers ONLY, the operator (Ex) and its vernacular counterpart, "some", and he is having in mind Quine. Warnock wants to say that a claim to existence may NOT be present in all 'there is', or (Ex) formulae. "Tigers exist", for example, he finds one of the most otiose thing to say in English. And so on. I discussed that bit when I was into considering the 'seven' formal devices that Grice lists as generating implicatures of note. "Some" being one of them. Note that 'some' (or (Ex)) formulae are not truth-functional. But in the case of these formulae, it is not just the relatively speaking relatively simple point by Quine that it all boils down to what values we accept for 'x'. For our talk (and thus, ontology) of 'there is' is PRETTY COMPLICATED. "There is beauty, and it is in the eye of the beholder". In this case, the values over which 'x' ranges are complex. It is a second-order statement. "There are a few pictures at the Louvre I find PARTICULARLY nice" also involves a second-order, seeing that 'nice' does not work as "dark", or "blue". Dark and blue are ways things are, but 'nice' applies to our perceiving, say, a particularly blue thing as 'attractive' or appealing to us. Aesthetic concepts (like 'nice', then) involve a special ontological framework (Sibley discusses this -- he belonged to the Warnock-Grice school). And so on.
Jones:
""On What there is" is perhaps ambivalent, rather than clearly opposite to the later paper (which I haven't read, still). It certainly seems antithetical to Carnap, because it is about "ontological commitment" and it is easy to think that that is exactly what Carnap denies when he distinguishes between internal and external questions and holds that a positive answer to an internal ontological question should not be confused with assent to the apparently relevant but actually meaningless external question. But if we read it in this way then Quine the logical empiricist almost comes out as a Platonist. My feeling is that the origins of this paper come from his analysis of Russell's "no class theory". Russell introduced the idea of "incomplete symbol" which appears in his theory of descriptions (in "On Denoting") but which applies also to his notation for classes in Principia Mathematica. Quine provides, in his "Set Theory and Its Logic" an analysis of exactly how much mathematics you can achieve by the use of "incomplete symbols" to talk as if classes exist without actually assuming the existence of classes. The disadvantage of this technique if you take it seriously is that, by hypothesis, these things that look like classes as far as the notation is concerned don't actually exist, and therefore are not in the range of bound variables (after all, existence, in modern logic, is just a quantifier, the things which exist are just the things in the range of the existential quantifier). In this context Quine is using the question whether or not you want the "class" to be in the range of quantification as a test for whether it can properly be called a virtual class or incomplete symbol. He is investigating what can be done with few things in the range of quantification."
I loved your exegesis, and it's most likely right. From what I recall, Quine's PhD at Harvard was v. much into all that, and possibly his first love _was_ Russell.
From what I recall, he does wax anti-Platonic at least at one point in "On what there is" where he refers to the 'beard of Plato' that the razor by Occam is supposed to cut, but I should revise that! --
From what I recall, his example is "Pegasus", and indeed
x pegasises.
comes out as something sensible to say (on occasion). I am told that the logician R. Martin called his cat "Pegasus" just to refute Quine.
---- But surely there are complications with the 'what-there-is' criterion (of x) when it comes, to use Jones's example:
------ classes per se.
and
-- universalia at large. For Quine would admit that 'being Pegasus' is now treated as a 'universal' (a predicate) which ranges over x, y, z. We look at our universe of discouse and we don't see any flying horse, so we conclude that 'nothing pegasises.' We may still, alla Grice in "Reply to Richards", want to consider empty classes ('vacuous names and descriptions'). Recall the subtleties brought by Grice in "Vacuous Names" that Jones has admirably identified and expanded on in his pdf document. "There is Pegasus". "Something is a flying horse". "There exists a flying horse", and so on. (Grice deals with these in term of syntactic scope distinctions, but various other approaches are conceivable, and Jones have dealt with some of them).
Jones:
"Quine conducts this analysis in the context of set theory, and its relevance to Principia Mathematica remains to be established. It is now generally accepted that Russell's no-class theory does not eliminate classes in the way that they would be eliminated if only virtual classes were admitted in set theory. This is because Russell's theory of types does have a complete hierachy of types of propositional functions, which, apart from not being extensional, are logically similar to sets. Russell's incomplete symbols in this case allow classes to be eliminated in favour of propositional functions, rather than eliminated altogether. So Russell's ontology is almost as rich as Zermelo set theory, but it just happens that the things in it are mostly functions not sets. The effect is that the limitations Quine illustrates on what can be done with virtual classes in set theory do not apply to their use in Russell's theory of types. Russell's ontological parsimony (at roundabout the time of Principia) was not limited to the "no class" theory. He followed up with his philosophy of logical atomism, which is more explicitly metaphysical."
I loved that! On top of that, he was an empiricist to the backbone, as I recall. And one which ended up influencing Oxford more than its share. Since Ayer was in love with the empiricism of Russell (what _things_ are 'sense data'? and G. A. Paul, one of Grice's group, and his reply to: "Is there a problem about sense data?").
Jones:
"As well as the distinction between real classes and virtual classes, Russell talks about logical fictions."
I think he was quoting Bentham?
"When he considers how to apply modern logic to science a key idea is the idea of a "logical construction"."
A lovely keyword that reappears in Grice, via Broad. Since Grice is defending, strongly, a 'logical construction' (versus pure ego, or disguised description) approach to "I" statement ("Personal identity"). What kind of metaphysics is implied, Grice asks, when one says,
"I was hit by a cricket ball."
What does "I" stand for? What is the value of x
(Ex) x was hit by a cricket ball.
He ends up suggesting that "I" refers to mnemonic states in chains of them, alla Locke. This is pure empiricism, in that he does not consider the extension of the _body_ -- just the memories of a thinking subject. He was possibly right. He does note that "I" sometimes seems to refer to just "my body" ("I fell from the stairs"), and so on. He wrote this in 1941, and one of his moving examples (!) was: "I will be fighting soon", where "I" is like a 'combo', he feels, of mind-AND-body (or soul, if you must). And so on.
Jones:
"So the idea is that complex objects are logical constructions from atomic entities of some kind (perhaps material atoms, perhaps sense data)."
Perhaps sense data, indeed. J. O. Urmson, one in Grice's group, was fascinated with this. He wrote a little book which was published by the OUP, "Philosophical analysis between the two wars", which is all about atomism. From what I recall, he seems to have seen Russell's empiricism of sense-data as fluent and sophisticated enough, while it was _Witters_'s (or Wittgenstein's) atomism he found pretty simplistic. He had a good example or two there. The atomism of:
"He took off his trousers and went to bed" p & q
"He went to bed and took off his trousers"
They depict the same state of affairs. The 'atoms' are just two, and the 'and then'-implicature of temporal succession is always cancellable ("But I do not mean to imply he did that in that order".) I was always fascinated by that example in that, in the original Urmson context (Grice will go on to use the same example, in "Presupposition and conversational implicature", but not in the WoW reprint) Urmson cares to consider the metaphysical implications. He then expands it to "if".
What sort of metaphysics, or ontology, is the one that one commits when one uses "if". He, like Grice, and zillions, think 'if' is only truth-functional. So the 'atom' "p" and the atom "q" then get combined. But Strawson and zillion others would disagree and allow for a different metaphysics, where the 'atoms' are not just truth-functionally correlated. There is an element of 'inferrability' that Strawson suggests is _entailed_ (or strictly, 'conventionally implicated') by "if p, q", that is NOT implicated by truth-functional equivalences of this. And so on.
Jones:
"These logical constructions yield logical fictions, but this does not mean that we do not need to have them in the range of the quantifiers. So incomplete symbols might possibly count as logical fictions, but they don't by any means exhaust the logical fictions, many of which (like propositional functions in general) are in the range of quantifiers. If we read Quine here as criticising Russell's beliefs about what can be achieved with incomplete symbols, then the criticism fails in two ways. Firstly because what you can do with incomplete symbols is not independent of context, Russell could manage without classes in the context of his type theory, even though Quine could not in a first order set theory (because he has no alternative ontology). Secondly, we may observe that Russell no more than Carnap believes that the range of the quantifiers has the metaphysical significance which Quine seems to suggest. Russell is happy to quantify over logical fictions, and presumably does not think that logical fictions are "real". Carnap goes one step further in denying that the metaphysical question is meaningful (let alone relevant)."
This above was excellent. The way Jones identified the main issues and provided questions to them.
Jones goes on:
"Carnap's step here is widely misunderstood, but I think should be regarded as possibly his most important contribution to metaphysics, for I know of no previous philosopher who considered it metaphysical even to allow that the questions (e.g. absolute, external. questions about existence) have an answer. This connects us with Carnap's "Principle of Tolerance". In "On What there Is", the alleged ontological commitment involved (let us suppose) in the use of a language, means that someone can be accused of inconsistency for using two languages whose ontological commitments are incompatible. It is this kind of accusation of inconsistency which, according to Carnap, provoked his principle of tolerance. As a graduate student he recalls discussions with friends in which he would use (say) materialistic or idealistic language depending on who he was talking to. He was then criticised by some for inconsistency. The idea is that you either are a materialist or an idealist. Whichever you are you must not use the language of the other, for that entails assent to multiple incompatible metaphysical ontologies."
I liked that. From what I recall, it had an influence in the USA (and Dummett!) via Sellars, and other empiricists. For indeed, are we being phenomenalist or physicalist in our language of choice? Grice would think that the 'syntax of illusion' (his phrase, but others as well) is more complex than that. It seems that the language (and syntax) not of 'material-object' (physicalism) but of sense data (idealism) is pretty complex. Grice was fascinated by ways one level (or stratum, to use Waissman's wording) entails the other.
"The pillar box seems red to me."
"It looks to me as if the pillar box is red."
and so on.
What would be a PHYSICALIST claim at this point? Grice is a Lockean, so
'x is red'
would not count, since we are having secondary qualities involved. So, it seems that the 'implicatures' of tolerance are many and varied.
--- (Dummett, in Truth and Other Enigmas, which includes some early pieces, elaborates on physicalism vs. phenomenalism in terms of the language of perception, and such).
---
Jones:
"Carnap's principle of tolerance is just the rejection of this point of view, the relativisation of metaphysics (which of course, once relativised may no longer be called metaphysics, and of course is not counted as metaphysics by Carnap, because it is just a working out of the semantics of the language and hence of necessity de dicto rather than de re). As to "The City of Eternal Truth", where are these to be found in ontology. After all this relativisation what room do we have for ontological absolutes, are there any necessary truths in ontology?
Well, the obvious candidates is questions of consistency.
Even if any ontology were possible, not every description of an ontology is consistent.
The natural context in which the most difficult questions of this kind are addressed is set theory, where the relative consistency of large cardinals is considered.
This is just the preferred language in which such questions are considered, and questions about the consistency of arbitrary logical systems (and their underlying ontologies) are generally answered by reduction to set theory.
If we argue that such questions are "absolute" in some sense, does that make them metaphysics rather than just logic?"
No, just logic!
This reminds me of Daniel Vanderveken and John Searle. I was, elsewhere, discussing their book and we found that Vanderveken just applied set-theory to all the machinations (if that's the word) by Searle. The result is a success! So, indeed, set-theory is all that a philosopher needs, sometime! And so on. But more later, I hope. Cheers.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Re: Izzing and Hazzing
Speranza
This is a comment to Jones in the 'comment' section to my "Re: Izzing and Hazzing".
Jones:
"One of the issues here is the relationship between metaphysics and linguistic meta-theory. There clearly is a close connection in the case of descriptive metaphysics, and that would be a possible Carnapian objection to this Strawsonian enterprise."
Very good point. Tal of meta-theory, or meta-language, reminds me of a delightful principle by Grice, the "Bootstrap". He possibly was onto something when he thought that one should be, in the metalanguage, always be able to pull oneself up by one's own bootstrap." But I would need to elaborate on that. He was thinking that the ontology of a metalanguage should better be cautious since everything in the metalanguage should be rewritten in the object-langauge. So the more paucuous (if that's the word) the metalanguage, the less work we are left for the morrow, is I think the way he described it.
Jones:
"It is one thing to observe the metaphysics implicit in ordinary language, another to show that you have thereby something more fundamental and philosophical than empirical linguistics."
I would be slightly careful about 'empirical linguistics'. A few empiricist (even Foucault-type?) philosophers may not disagree about that point. For some -- I think there is a well-developed Scandinavian school of this sort of thought -- philosophy, qua discipline for the philosopher -- IS an empirical discipline in that it studies and analyses the way people talk and think. NOT qua linguistics, empirical, but as a sort of 'descriptive Athenian dialectic', as it were. You want to know what 'justice' is? Or how the logic of 'right' works in its right terms? You just go to the 'agora', as Socrates did, and inquire the folk. (Socrates was NOT an empiricist in this sense, in that he hoped to CORRECT 'ta legomena', or what people were saying -- I don't think Grice emphasises this point too much when he has Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as involved in 'ta legomena' in various ways. Surely he is thinking of Aristotle, rather than Socrates or Plato).
Jones:
"On the other hand, if Carnap were to accept my suggestion that a part of defining a truth semantics of a formal language is defining the relevant concept of "possible world" or state of affairs (this is the domain of the truth conditions, considered as a truth-valued function, it is this which prevents there being necessity de re and without it the semantics is incomplete) then doing metaphysics is part of defining the semantics of a language, a part of prescriptive metatheory."
Excellent point. I enjoy your use of 'descriptive' metaphysics at the object-language level, and 'prescriptive' metatheory.
Jones:
"I'm not convinced that the stability of the English Language is decisive. There does not seem to be stability in metaphysics. It does seem to me, as you seem to be suggesting at the end, that English allows you to manipulate the context of discourse so as to install whatever metaphysics you like. That is what makes this kind of meta-theoretic discussion of metaphysics possible. Must stop otherwise the comment will get too big!"
Too right, about the 'manipulation'. Of course, the point of the classical Grice, is to suggest that there is a truth-conditional core (the 'dictive', the alhetic), and that those 'manipulations' should better use pragmatic notions like 'implicature', since (this seems to be the point of the classic Grice), all too often, a philosopher make take, say, an 'implicatum', for what is 'part of what is being entailed' (part of an alethic condition).
And so on, but now I will comment on the other blog post by Jones.
Cheers.
This is a comment to Jones in the 'comment' section to my "Re: Izzing and Hazzing".
Jones:
"One of the issues here is the relationship between metaphysics and linguistic meta-theory. There clearly is a close connection in the case of descriptive metaphysics, and that would be a possible Carnapian objection to this Strawsonian enterprise."
Very good point. Tal of meta-theory, or meta-language, reminds me of a delightful principle by Grice, the "Bootstrap". He possibly was onto something when he thought that one should be, in the metalanguage, always be able to pull oneself up by one's own bootstrap." But I would need to elaborate on that. He was thinking that the ontology of a metalanguage should better be cautious since everything in the metalanguage should be rewritten in the object-langauge. So the more paucuous (if that's the word) the metalanguage, the less work we are left for the morrow, is I think the way he described it.
Jones:
"It is one thing to observe the metaphysics implicit in ordinary language, another to show that you have thereby something more fundamental and philosophical than empirical linguistics."
I would be slightly careful about 'empirical linguistics'. A few empiricist (even Foucault-type?) philosophers may not disagree about that point. For some -- I think there is a well-developed Scandinavian school of this sort of thought -- philosophy, qua discipline for the philosopher -- IS an empirical discipline in that it studies and analyses the way people talk and think. NOT qua linguistics, empirical, but as a sort of 'descriptive Athenian dialectic', as it were. You want to know what 'justice' is? Or how the logic of 'right' works in its right terms? You just go to the 'agora', as Socrates did, and inquire the folk. (Socrates was NOT an empiricist in this sense, in that he hoped to CORRECT 'ta legomena', or what people were saying -- I don't think Grice emphasises this point too much when he has Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as involved in 'ta legomena' in various ways. Surely he is thinking of Aristotle, rather than Socrates or Plato).
Jones:
"On the other hand, if Carnap were to accept my suggestion that a part of defining a truth semantics of a formal language is defining the relevant concept of "possible world" or state of affairs (this is the domain of the truth conditions, considered as a truth-valued function, it is this which prevents there being necessity de re and without it the semantics is incomplete) then doing metaphysics is part of defining the semantics of a language, a part of prescriptive metatheory."
Excellent point. I enjoy your use of 'descriptive' metaphysics at the object-language level, and 'prescriptive' metatheory.
Jones:
"I'm not convinced that the stability of the English Language is decisive. There does not seem to be stability in metaphysics. It does seem to me, as you seem to be suggesting at the end, that English allows you to manipulate the context of discourse so as to install whatever metaphysics you like. That is what makes this kind of meta-theoretic discussion of metaphysics possible. Must stop otherwise the comment will get too big!"
Too right, about the 'manipulation'. Of course, the point of the classical Grice, is to suggest that there is a truth-conditional core (the 'dictive', the alhetic), and that those 'manipulations' should better use pragmatic notions like 'implicature', since (this seems to be the point of the classic Grice), all too often, a philosopher make take, say, an 'implicatum', for what is 'part of what is being entailed' (part of an alethic condition).
And so on, but now I will comment on the other blog post by Jones.
Cheers.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Quine and Carnap on Ontology
This is rather rambling, and what I say about Quine is speculative and probably not entirely correct, but I'm posting anyway.
After complaining about Quine's "On What There is" being diametrically opposed to Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" (and I was thinking of it as the third in a triumvirate of Quinean oppositions to the core of Carnap's philosophy, the other two being the analytic/synthetic distinction and modal logic) the words "Ontological Relativity" popped up in my head, by way of reference to a contribution of Quine's in this area which I have never actually seen.
I searched my little philosophical library and discovered that I really did not have a copy, and decided to have a look when next I visit the British Library.
(and also to get Code from PGRICE, no longer readable on google books, and the journal in which Grice on Aristotle appears).
However, notwithstanding my never having read the paper, just the sight of a few lines of commentary suffices to change my perception of Quine on this topic. It seems that though "On What there is" seems contrary to Carnap, "Ontological Relativity", apart from being naturalistic rather than formalistic, is on the same lines as Carnap, i.e. it is relativistic; ontology is relative to language. That also makes it broadly similar I would guess, to Grice, for he had a relaxed liberal attitude to ontology, and one might perhaps think he allowed relativity to context not just language (which I'm sure the other two could be stretched to as well).
It may be worth exploring this a little further for we are here saying something about absolute metaphysics, i.e. that ontology is not a part of it, ontological claims are supposed to be relative rather than absolute.
"On What there is" is perhaps ambivalent, rather than clearly opposite to the later paper (which I haven't read, still).
It certainly seems antithetical to Carnap, because it is about "ontological commitment" and it is easy to think that that is exactly what Carnap denies when he distinguishes between internal and external questions and holds that a positive answer to an internal ontological question should not be confused with assent to the apparently relevant but actually meaningless external question.
But if we read it in this way then Quine the logical empiricist almost comes out as a Platonist.
My feeling is that the origins of this paper come from his analysis of Russell's "no class theory". Russell introduced the idea of "incomplete symbol" which appears in his theory of descriptions (in "On Denoting") but which applies also to his notation for classes in Principia Mathematica. Quine provides, in his "Set Theory and Its Logic" an analysis of exactly how much mathematics you can achieve by the use of "incomplete symbols" to talk as if classes exist without actually assuming the existence of classes. The disadvantage of this technique if you take it seriously is that, by hypothesis, these things that look like classes as far as the notation is concerned don't actually exist, and therefore are not in the range of bound variables (after all, existence, in modern logic, is just a quantifier, the things which exist are just the things in the range of the existential quantifier). In this context Quine is using the question whether or not you want the "class" to be in the range of quantification as a test for whether it can properly be called a virtual class or incomplete symbol. He is investigating what can be done with few things in the range of quantification.
Quine conducts this analysis in the context of set theory, and its relevance to Principia Mathematics remains to be established. It is now generally accepted that Russell's no-class theory does not eliminate classes in the way that they would be eliminated if only virtual classes were admitted in set theory.
This is because Russell's theory of types does have a complete hierachy of types of propositional functions, which, apart from not being extensional, are logically similar to sets. Russell's incomplete symbols in this case allow classes to be eliminated in favour of propositional functions, rather than eliminated altogether. So Russell's ontology is almost as rich as zermelo set theory, but it just happens that the things in it are mostly functions not sets.
The effect is that the limitations Quine illustrates on what can be done with virtual classes in set theory do not apply to their use in Russell's theory of types.
Russell's ontological parsimony (at roundabout the time of Principia) was not limited to the "no class" theory. He followed up with his philosophy of logical atomism, which is more explicitly metaphysical. As well as the distinction between real classes and virtual classes, Russell talks about logical fictions.
When he considers how to apply modern logic to science a key idea is the idea of a "logical construction". So the idea is that complex objects are logical constructions from atomic entities of some kind (perhaps material atoms, perhaps sense data). These logical constructions yield logical fictions, but this does not mean that we do not need to have them in the range of the quantifiers.
So incomplete symbols might possibly count as logical fictions, but they don't by any means exhaust the logical fictions, many of which (like propositional functions in general) are in the range of quantifiers.
If we read Quine here as criticising Russell's beliefs about what can be achieved with incomplete symbols, then the criticism fails in two ways. Firstly because what you can do with incomplete symbols is not independent of context, Russell could manage without classes in the context of his type theory, even though Quine could not in a first order set theory (because he has no alternative ontology). Secondly, we may observe that Russell no more than Carnap believes that the range of the quantifiers has the metaphysical significance which Quine seems to suggest. Russell is happy to quantify over logical fictions, and presumably does not think that logical fictions are "real". Carnap goes one step further in denying that the metaphysical question is meaningful (let alone relevant).
Carnap's step here is widely misunderstood, but I think should be regarded as possibly his most important contribution to metaphysics, for I know of no previous philosopher who considered it metaphysical even to allow that the questions (e.g. absolute, external. questions about existence) have an answer.
This connects us with Carnap's "Principle of Tolerance".
In "On What there Is", the alleged ontological commitment involved (let us suppose) in the use of a language, means that someone can be accused of inconsistency for using two languages whose ontological commitments are incompatible. It is this kind of accusation of inconsistency which, according to Carnap, provoked his principle of tolerance.
As a graduate student he recalls discussions with friends in which he would use (say) materialistic or idealistic language depending on who he was talking to. He was then criticised by some for inconsistency. The idea is that you either are a materialist or an idealist. Whichever you are you must not use the language of the other, for that entails assent to multiple incompatible metaphysical ontologies.
Carnap's principle of tolerance is just the rejection of this point of view, the relativisation of metaphysics (which of course, once relativised may no longer be called metaphysics, and of course is not counted as metaphysics by Carnap, because it is just a working out of the semantics of the language and hence of necessity de dicto rather than de re).
As to "The City of Eternal Truth", where are these to be found in ontology.
After all this relativisation what room do we have for ontological absolutes, are there any necessary truths in ontology?
Well, the obvious candidates is questions of consistency.
Even if any ontology were possible, not every description of an ontology is consistent.
The natural context in which the most difficult questions of this kind are addressed is set theory, where the relative consistency of large cardinals is considered.
This is just the preferred language in which such questions are considered, and questions about the consistency of arbitrary logical systems (and their underlying ontologies) are generally answered by reduction to set theory.
If we argue that such questions are "absolute" in some sense, does that make them metaphysics rather than just logic?
RBJ
After complaining about Quine's "On What There is" being diametrically opposed to Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" (and I was thinking of it as the third in a triumvirate of Quinean oppositions to the core of Carnap's philosophy, the other two being the analytic/synthetic distinction and modal logic) the words "Ontological Relativity" popped up in my head, by way of reference to a contribution of Quine's in this area which I have never actually seen.
I searched my little philosophical library and discovered that I really did not have a copy, and decided to have a look when next I visit the British Library.
(and also to get Code from PGRICE, no longer readable on google books, and the journal in which Grice on Aristotle appears).
However, notwithstanding my never having read the paper, just the sight of a few lines of commentary suffices to change my perception of Quine on this topic. It seems that though "On What there is" seems contrary to Carnap, "Ontological Relativity", apart from being naturalistic rather than formalistic, is on the same lines as Carnap, i.e. it is relativistic; ontology is relative to language. That also makes it broadly similar I would guess, to Grice, for he had a relaxed liberal attitude to ontology, and one might perhaps think he allowed relativity to context not just language (which I'm sure the other two could be stretched to as well).
It may be worth exploring this a little further for we are here saying something about absolute metaphysics, i.e. that ontology is not a part of it, ontological claims are supposed to be relative rather than absolute.
"On What there is" is perhaps ambivalent, rather than clearly opposite to the later paper (which I haven't read, still).
It certainly seems antithetical to Carnap, because it is about "ontological commitment" and it is easy to think that that is exactly what Carnap denies when he distinguishes between internal and external questions and holds that a positive answer to an internal ontological question should not be confused with assent to the apparently relevant but actually meaningless external question.
But if we read it in this way then Quine the logical empiricist almost comes out as a Platonist.
My feeling is that the origins of this paper come from his analysis of Russell's "no class theory". Russell introduced the idea of "incomplete symbol" which appears in his theory of descriptions (in "On Denoting") but which applies also to his notation for classes in Principia Mathematica. Quine provides, in his "Set Theory and Its Logic" an analysis of exactly how much mathematics you can achieve by the use of "incomplete symbols" to talk as if classes exist without actually assuming the existence of classes. The disadvantage of this technique if you take it seriously is that, by hypothesis, these things that look like classes as far as the notation is concerned don't actually exist, and therefore are not in the range of bound variables (after all, existence, in modern logic, is just a quantifier, the things which exist are just the things in the range of the existential quantifier). In this context Quine is using the question whether or not you want the "class" to be in the range of quantification as a test for whether it can properly be called a virtual class or incomplete symbol. He is investigating what can be done with few things in the range of quantification.
Quine conducts this analysis in the context of set theory, and its relevance to Principia Mathematics remains to be established. It is now generally accepted that Russell's no-class theory does not eliminate classes in the way that they would be eliminated if only virtual classes were admitted in set theory.
This is because Russell's theory of types does have a complete hierachy of types of propositional functions, which, apart from not being extensional, are logically similar to sets. Russell's incomplete symbols in this case allow classes to be eliminated in favour of propositional functions, rather than eliminated altogether. So Russell's ontology is almost as rich as zermelo set theory, but it just happens that the things in it are mostly functions not sets.
The effect is that the limitations Quine illustrates on what can be done with virtual classes in set theory do not apply to their use in Russell's theory of types.
Russell's ontological parsimony (at roundabout the time of Principia) was not limited to the "no class" theory. He followed up with his philosophy of logical atomism, which is more explicitly metaphysical. As well as the distinction between real classes and virtual classes, Russell talks about logical fictions.
When he considers how to apply modern logic to science a key idea is the idea of a "logical construction". So the idea is that complex objects are logical constructions from atomic entities of some kind (perhaps material atoms, perhaps sense data). These logical constructions yield logical fictions, but this does not mean that we do not need to have them in the range of the quantifiers.
So incomplete symbols might possibly count as logical fictions, but they don't by any means exhaust the logical fictions, many of which (like propositional functions in general) are in the range of quantifiers.
If we read Quine here as criticising Russell's beliefs about what can be achieved with incomplete symbols, then the criticism fails in two ways. Firstly because what you can do with incomplete symbols is not independent of context, Russell could manage without classes in the context of his type theory, even though Quine could not in a first order set theory (because he has no alternative ontology). Secondly, we may observe that Russell no more than Carnap believes that the range of the quantifiers has the metaphysical significance which Quine seems to suggest. Russell is happy to quantify over logical fictions, and presumably does not think that logical fictions are "real". Carnap goes one step further in denying that the metaphysical question is meaningful (let alone relevant).
Carnap's step here is widely misunderstood, but I think should be regarded as possibly his most important contribution to metaphysics, for I know of no previous philosopher who considered it metaphysical even to allow that the questions (e.g. absolute, external. questions about existence) have an answer.
This connects us with Carnap's "Principle of Tolerance".
In "On What there Is", the alleged ontological commitment involved (let us suppose) in the use of a language, means that someone can be accused of inconsistency for using two languages whose ontological commitments are incompatible. It is this kind of accusation of inconsistency which, according to Carnap, provoked his principle of tolerance.
As a graduate student he recalls discussions with friends in which he would use (say) materialistic or idealistic language depending on who he was talking to. He was then criticised by some for inconsistency. The idea is that you either are a materialist or an idealist. Whichever you are you must not use the language of the other, for that entails assent to multiple incompatible metaphysical ontologies.
Carnap's principle of tolerance is just the rejection of this point of view, the relativisation of metaphysics (which of course, once relativised may no longer be called metaphysics, and of course is not counted as metaphysics by Carnap, because it is just a working out of the semantics of the language and hence of necessity de dicto rather than de re).
As to "The City of Eternal Truth", where are these to be found in ontology.
After all this relativisation what room do we have for ontological absolutes, are there any necessary truths in ontology?
Well, the obvious candidates is questions of consistency.
Even if any ontology were possible, not every description of an ontology is consistent.
The natural context in which the most difficult questions of this kind are addressed is set theory, where the relative consistency of large cardinals is considered.
This is just the preferred language in which such questions are considered, and questions about the consistency of arbitrary logical systems (and their underlying ontologies) are generally answered by reduction to set theory.
If we argue that such questions are "absolute" in some sense, does that make them metaphysics rather than just logic?
RBJ
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Re: Izzing and Hazzing
Speranza
Jones writes:
"How scandalous that I should write about categories and Grice without mentioning "izz" and "hazz"; so I make it the title this time. For the record, the distinction between intercategorial and intracategorial predication is exactly that between Grice's neologisms "izz" and "hazz", where izz is essential and hazz accidental."
Indeed, and thanks for that!
---- "the crunch comes with negation", I think is Grice's phrase.
Jones goes on to explore the issue of negation:
"Thanks JL for an interesting commentary, and enlightenment on many aspects. The big problem with insisting on truth values for category errors is the way it interacts with negation. For opponents it is less the falsehood of the errors which is a problem than the truth of their negations, and the asymmetry (because which way is up seems arbitrary). Suppose we have two colour predicates "white", "coloured" which are complementary. Then "ideas are white" as a category error would be false as would "ideas are coloured". But then coloured is a synonym for "not white", and "ideas are coloured" should be the same as "ideas are not white", which we expect to be the same as the negation of "ideas are white" and hence true. The "looseness" I spoke of in an earlier post (somewhere) might help here, because it preserves all the classical logical relationships. We just say that category mistakes still yield truth values, but the truth value is not defined (which is not the same as having an "undefined" third truth value). In my formal treatment of izzing and hazzing, which is essentially done in two valued logic, I wrote the definitions so that they come out definitely false if the obvious criteria for truth fail. It would be easy in that context to give a loose specification. I didn't do that because I couldn't really see any advantages in that course, and I am not yet aware of anything in Aristotle to convince me that he would have intended something like that."
Sorry I have so far little to comment on all that interesting material above. I will, I hope. Right now, I'm re-quoting in this blog post, and only for the record, as it were. But indeed, as Jones and Grice notes, the crunch comes with negation, in ways. Negation, of course, is just one of the many logical operators. Grice seems to be saying that, qua operator, 'not' carries implicatures (e.g. an implicature of minimal scope). Logically, negation carries maximal scope. So, the negation of an utterance can thus receive these two 'interpretations' ("Ideas are not coloured" -- "it is not the case that ideas are coloured"). I'm glad that Jones feels able to provide for this systematically. It seems economical for the Griceian to explain negation alla Boole, say, and account for the oddity of "Ideas are not coloured" elseway, as it were.
Jones then considers the topic of 'sytematic error'. How erroneous can, say, 'stone-age physics' be? More generally, how erroneous can 'ta legomena' be?
"As to finding the way forward from categories as exegesis of Aristotle to something closer to absolute metaphysics, I don't yet see how that could be done, and don't want to presume that it can be. I am resistant mainly because I don't see the categories of achieving what they aimed to achieve, and so that makes them poor candidates for consideration as absolute. On the exegetical side I have my formalisation in Aristotle's Logic and Metaphysics, and I do hope that I will eventually get back and move that forward, and I am certainly interested in what Grice might have to say about what true metaphysics can be mined from it, but rather expect that Carnap and I (even after I have persuaded him to be less dogmatic in his use of the word "metaphysics") will be parsimonious users of the term. On the Gricean view that systematic error is impossible (I am interested to know where we find that in Aristotle) I am not wholly convinced. Of course it depends what systematic means here. It seems to me that many commonly held beliefs are false, but what would count as "systematically false"? There is of course a big difference between systematic error about the meaning of language and systematic error about some matter of fact, but it is surely the latter and least plausible of the two which would have to be denied to give absolute metaphysics? So I definitely would want to see more to persuade me we were grasping something absolute."
I would think that Grice and Davidson interacted on that realm, somehow. The idea is further developed by Davidson, I would think. Why some of our beliefs have to be true, say. Grice sees this as 'transcendental'. As we apply this we need to narrow down the field then:
Categories -- become, say, 'categories of English' (where English is a natural language).
If everything we say in English (qua ordinary language) happens to be _false_ as when compared to, say, what quantum-physics says about things, then, we seem to be in trouble. So, Aristotle's and Grice's point (qua Athenian and Oxonian dialectic, as per the "Retrospective Epilogue") seem to work on the assumption that
'Ta legomena' (things said -- in Greek or English) must be, in great part, true.
---- But I should revise all that.
Jones:
"As to Quine's "On what there is?", there is little hope of carrying Carnap forward on that basis, not least because this paper is pretty much the antithesis of Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" which is the very heart of Carnap's enterprise (IMO). Quine says that we are "committed" to the existence of all the entities over which "our" quantifiers range. Carnap says that the (external) question of whether the entities over which some language quantifies is meaningless (at first, later, lacking cognitive content). Being sure whether they are strictly contradicting each other is not wholly straightforward because Quine doesn't accept the internal/external distinction and Quine's holism makes it uncertain whether he ever really is talking about absolutes rather than expedients. But nevertheless, the informal thrust are opposite. Even if Quine's holism admitted metaphysics, I could not give credence as absolute to a metaphysic justified by Quine's holism. I should myself be inclined to treat it on a par with descriptive metaphysics, and expect some kind of additional argument in favour of taking any of it as absolute."
Good points.
Incidentally, I like your attribute, 'exegetical' as applied to 'metaphysics' -- versus 'revisionary' or 'descriptive'.
Exegetical I associate with 'interpretative', as it were. It may pay to order the vocabulary, say.
How does one provide a 'metaphysical' interpretation. When Whitehead proposed his 'process metaphysics', he was told that the subject-and-predicate Aristotelian metaphysics does not quite fit the 'process' view that Whitehead was defending. But he was told that some native American languages perhaps agreed more, in terms of their 'categories', with this 'process metaphysics'.
So, it seems that, besides the object-language (of clouds, stones, snow, beauty, human beings, persons, minds, beliefs, and so on), there is a sort of meta-language, that contains 'ontological categories' proper ("A stone is a thing"). It may be that a language lacks this ontological vocabulary. But English _is_ endowed with ontological vocabulary (of 'thing', 'attribute', and even 'substance').
In this respect, there is room, within the language, for metaphysical interpretation. If someone says, "the mind is not a thing" -- cfr. Descartes on 'res extensa' and its opposite --, he may still accept the term 'mind' (in the realm of hazzing) and negate that it falls within the 'ontological' category of 'thing'.
And so on. In other words, I would think that it's ordinary speakers themselves who should be endowed with the ability to 'interpret', metaphysically, the things they say or are committed to. Grice saw this when in "Method in philosophical pscyhology" he provides a continuum, as it were, between the ordinary speakers (or 'pirots') and an intelligent breed of them, whom he refers to as the 'metaphysicians' -- his is a 'genitorial' programme, where the pirot becomes his own genitor, as it were.
But I should re-read all the bits that Jones is adding to the discussion, and further comment, at a later stage.
Note that the assimilation 'exegetical' with 'interpretive' (mine, not Jones's) is perhaps vague. After all, the term the Latin philosophers were thinking of when using, say, Aristotle, "De interpretatione", is 'hermeneia', rather. And 'hermeneia' is not quite 'exegesis'.
Descriptive, exegetical, revisionary, prescriptive. Popper would say that science is always revising itself. So, scientific metaphysics (if there is such a thing) should be in a constant flow. With natural language, things seem to be different. The categories of, say, English, have remained the same for centuries. Indeed, they may be traced back to proto-Indo-European.
Sapir-Whorf, as we turn back to, say, the languages of the native-Americans, thought that the categories of language determine our thought-categories, and ultimately, then our conception of ontological categories. Jones, who has studied 'perfect languages', like Wilkins's, and Leibniz', may relate this to that. When Leibniz or Wilkins thought of a 'characteristica universalis', perhaps they were trying to start afresh. Think of the proper ontology, and provide a language to match.
In the case of 'natural' languages, our mother tongues (the tongues we learn from our mothers, strictly) things are never too easy. The language is already 'theory-laden', as it were. While there is indeed 'ontological freedom' -- a realist and a nominalist may both express their disagreements in English --, the speaker who has not reflected on the ontological (not to say, metaphysical) dimensions of what he is saying may require a crash course in eschatology, and still fail!
And so on.
Cheers.
Jones writes:
"How scandalous that I should write about categories and Grice without mentioning "izz" and "hazz"; so I make it the title this time. For the record, the distinction between intercategorial and intracategorial predication is exactly that between Grice's neologisms "izz" and "hazz", where izz is essential and hazz accidental."
Indeed, and thanks for that!
---- "the crunch comes with negation", I think is Grice's phrase.
Jones goes on to explore the issue of negation:
"Thanks JL for an interesting commentary, and enlightenment on many aspects. The big problem with insisting on truth values for category errors is the way it interacts with negation. For opponents it is less the falsehood of the errors which is a problem than the truth of their negations, and the asymmetry (because which way is up seems arbitrary). Suppose we have two colour predicates "white", "coloured" which are complementary. Then "ideas are white" as a category error would be false as would "ideas are coloured". But then coloured is a synonym for "not white", and "ideas are coloured" should be the same as "ideas are not white", which we expect to be the same as the negation of "ideas are white" and hence true. The "looseness" I spoke of in an earlier post (somewhere) might help here, because it preserves all the classical logical relationships. We just say that category mistakes still yield truth values, but the truth value is not defined (which is not the same as having an "undefined" third truth value). In my formal treatment of izzing and hazzing, which is essentially done in two valued logic, I wrote the definitions so that they come out definitely false if the obvious criteria for truth fail. It would be easy in that context to give a loose specification. I didn't do that because I couldn't really see any advantages in that course, and I am not yet aware of anything in Aristotle to convince me that he would have intended something like that."
Sorry I have so far little to comment on all that interesting material above. I will, I hope. Right now, I'm re-quoting in this blog post, and only for the record, as it were. But indeed, as Jones and Grice notes, the crunch comes with negation, in ways. Negation, of course, is just one of the many logical operators. Grice seems to be saying that, qua operator, 'not' carries implicatures (e.g. an implicature of minimal scope). Logically, negation carries maximal scope. So, the negation of an utterance can thus receive these two 'interpretations' ("Ideas are not coloured" -- "it is not the case that ideas are coloured"). I'm glad that Jones feels able to provide for this systematically. It seems economical for the Griceian to explain negation alla Boole, say, and account for the oddity of "Ideas are not coloured" elseway, as it were.
Jones then considers the topic of 'sytematic error'. How erroneous can, say, 'stone-age physics' be? More generally, how erroneous can 'ta legomena' be?
"As to finding the way forward from categories as exegesis of Aristotle to something closer to absolute metaphysics, I don't yet see how that could be done, and don't want to presume that it can be. I am resistant mainly because I don't see the categories of achieving what they aimed to achieve, and so that makes them poor candidates for consideration as absolute. On the exegetical side I have my formalisation in Aristotle's Logic and Metaphysics, and I do hope that I will eventually get back and move that forward, and I am certainly interested in what Grice might have to say about what true metaphysics can be mined from it, but rather expect that Carnap and I (even after I have persuaded him to be less dogmatic in his use of the word "metaphysics") will be parsimonious users of the term. On the Gricean view that systematic error is impossible (I am interested to know where we find that in Aristotle) I am not wholly convinced. Of course it depends what systematic means here. It seems to me that many commonly held beliefs are false, but what would count as "systematically false"? There is of course a big difference between systematic error about the meaning of language and systematic error about some matter of fact, but it is surely the latter and least plausible of the two which would have to be denied to give absolute metaphysics? So I definitely would want to see more to persuade me we were grasping something absolute."
I would think that Grice and Davidson interacted on that realm, somehow. The idea is further developed by Davidson, I would think. Why some of our beliefs have to be true, say. Grice sees this as 'transcendental'. As we apply this we need to narrow down the field then:
Categories -- become, say, 'categories of English' (where English is a natural language).
If everything we say in English (qua ordinary language) happens to be _false_ as when compared to, say, what quantum-physics says about things, then, we seem to be in trouble. So, Aristotle's and Grice's point (qua Athenian and Oxonian dialectic, as per the "Retrospective Epilogue") seem to work on the assumption that
'Ta legomena' (things said -- in Greek or English) must be, in great part, true.
---- But I should revise all that.
Jones:
"As to Quine's "On what there is?", there is little hope of carrying Carnap forward on that basis, not least because this paper is pretty much the antithesis of Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" which is the very heart of Carnap's enterprise (IMO). Quine says that we are "committed" to the existence of all the entities over which "our" quantifiers range. Carnap says that the (external) question of whether the entities over which some language quantifies is meaningless (at first, later, lacking cognitive content). Being sure whether they are strictly contradicting each other is not wholly straightforward because Quine doesn't accept the internal/external distinction and Quine's holism makes it uncertain whether he ever really is talking about absolutes rather than expedients. But nevertheless, the informal thrust are opposite. Even if Quine's holism admitted metaphysics, I could not give credence as absolute to a metaphysic justified by Quine's holism. I should myself be inclined to treat it on a par with descriptive metaphysics, and expect some kind of additional argument in favour of taking any of it as absolute."
Good points.
Incidentally, I like your attribute, 'exegetical' as applied to 'metaphysics' -- versus 'revisionary' or 'descriptive'.
Exegetical I associate with 'interpretative', as it were. It may pay to order the vocabulary, say.
How does one provide a 'metaphysical' interpretation. When Whitehead proposed his 'process metaphysics', he was told that the subject-and-predicate Aristotelian metaphysics does not quite fit the 'process' view that Whitehead was defending. But he was told that some native American languages perhaps agreed more, in terms of their 'categories', with this 'process metaphysics'.
So, it seems that, besides the object-language (of clouds, stones, snow, beauty, human beings, persons, minds, beliefs, and so on), there is a sort of meta-language, that contains 'ontological categories' proper ("A stone is a thing"). It may be that a language lacks this ontological vocabulary. But English _is_ endowed with ontological vocabulary (of 'thing', 'attribute', and even 'substance').
In this respect, there is room, within the language, for metaphysical interpretation. If someone says, "the mind is not a thing" -- cfr. Descartes on 'res extensa' and its opposite --, he may still accept the term 'mind' (in the realm of hazzing) and negate that it falls within the 'ontological' category of 'thing'.
And so on. In other words, I would think that it's ordinary speakers themselves who should be endowed with the ability to 'interpret', metaphysically, the things they say or are committed to. Grice saw this when in "Method in philosophical pscyhology" he provides a continuum, as it were, between the ordinary speakers (or 'pirots') and an intelligent breed of them, whom he refers to as the 'metaphysicians' -- his is a 'genitorial' programme, where the pirot becomes his own genitor, as it were.
But I should re-read all the bits that Jones is adding to the discussion, and further comment, at a later stage.
Note that the assimilation 'exegetical' with 'interpretive' (mine, not Jones's) is perhaps vague. After all, the term the Latin philosophers were thinking of when using, say, Aristotle, "De interpretatione", is 'hermeneia', rather. And 'hermeneia' is not quite 'exegesis'.
Descriptive, exegetical, revisionary, prescriptive. Popper would say that science is always revising itself. So, scientific metaphysics (if there is such a thing) should be in a constant flow. With natural language, things seem to be different. The categories of, say, English, have remained the same for centuries. Indeed, they may be traced back to proto-Indo-European.
Sapir-Whorf, as we turn back to, say, the languages of the native-Americans, thought that the categories of language determine our thought-categories, and ultimately, then our conception of ontological categories. Jones, who has studied 'perfect languages', like Wilkins's, and Leibniz', may relate this to that. When Leibniz or Wilkins thought of a 'characteristica universalis', perhaps they were trying to start afresh. Think of the proper ontology, and provide a language to match.
In the case of 'natural' languages, our mother tongues (the tongues we learn from our mothers, strictly) things are never too easy. The language is already 'theory-laden', as it were. While there is indeed 'ontological freedom' -- a realist and a nominalist may both express their disagreements in English --, the speaker who has not reflected on the ontological (not to say, metaphysical) dimensions of what he is saying may require a crash course in eschatology, and still fail!
And so on.
Cheers.
Izzing and Hazzing
How scandalous that I should write about categories and Grice without mentioning "izz" and "hazz"; so I make it the title this time.
For the record, the distinction between intercategorial and intracategorial predication is exactly that between Grice's neologisms "izz" and "hazz", where izz is essential and hazz accidental.
Thanks JL for an interesting commentary, and enlightenment on many aspects.
The big problem with insisting on truth values for category errors is the way it interacts with negation.
For opponents it is less the falsehood of the errors which is a problem than the truth of their negations, and the asymmetry (because which way is up seems arbitrary).
Suppose we have two colour predicates "white", "coloured" which are complementary. Then "ideas are white" as a category error would be false as would "ideas are coloured". But then coloured is a synonym for "not white", and "ideas are coloured" should be the same as "ideas are not white", which we expect to be the same as the negation of "ideas are white" and hence true.
The "looseness" I spoke of in an earlier post (somewhere) might help here, because it preserves all the classical logical relationships.
We just say that category mistakes still yield truth values, but the truth value is not defined (which is not the same as having an "undefined" third truth value).
In my formal treatment of izzing and hazzing, which is essentially done in two valued logic, I wrote the definitions so that they come out definitely false if the obvious criteria for truth fail.
It would be easy in that context to give a loose specification.
I didn't do that because I couldn't really see any advantages in that course, and I am not yet aware of anything in Aristotle to convince me that he would have intended something like that.
As to finding the way forward from categories as exegesis of Aristotle to something closer to absolute metaphysics, I don't yet see how that could be done, and don't want to presume that it can be. I am resistant mainly because I don't see the categories of achieving what they aimed to achieve, and so that makes them poor candidates for consideration as absolute.
On the exegetical side I have my formalisation in Aristotle's Logic and Metaphysics, and I do hope that I will eventually get back and move that forward, and I am certainly interested in what Grice might have to say about what true metaphysics can be mined from it, but rather expect that Carnap and I (even after I have persuaded him to be less dogmatic in his use of the word "metaphysics") will be parsimonious users of the term.
On the Gricean view that systematic error is impossible (I am interested to know where we find that in Aristotle) I am not wholly convinced.
Of course it depends what systematic means here.
It seems to me that many commonly held beliefs are false, but what would count as "systematically false"?
There is of course a big difference between systematic error about the meaning of language and systematic error about some matter of fact, but it is surely the latter and least plausible of the two which would have to be denied to give absolute metaphysics?
So I definitely would want to see more to persuade me we were grasping something absolute.
AS to Quine's "On what there is?", there is little hope of carrying Carnap forward on that basis, not least because this paper is pretty much the antithesis of Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" which is the very heart of Carnap's enterprise (IMO).
Quine says that we are "committed" to the existence of all the entities over which "our" quantifiers range.
Carnap says that the (external) question of whether the entities over which some language quantifies is meaningless (at first, later, lacking cognitive content).
Being sure whether they are strictly contradicting each other is not wholly straightforward because Quine doesn't accept the internal/external distinction and Quine's holism makes it uncertain whether he ever really is talking about absolutes rather than expedients. But nevertheless, the informal thrust are opposite.
Even if Quine's holism admitted metaphysics, I could not give credence as absolute to a metaphysic justified by Quine's holism. I should myself be inclined to treat it on a par with descriptive metaphysics, and expect some kind of additional argument in favour of taking any of it as absolute.
For the record, the distinction between intercategorial and intracategorial predication is exactly that between Grice's neologisms "izz" and "hazz", where izz is essential and hazz accidental.
Thanks JL for an interesting commentary, and enlightenment on many aspects.
The big problem with insisting on truth values for category errors is the way it interacts with negation.
For opponents it is less the falsehood of the errors which is a problem than the truth of their negations, and the asymmetry (because which way is up seems arbitrary).
Suppose we have two colour predicates "white", "coloured" which are complementary. Then "ideas are white" as a category error would be false as would "ideas are coloured". But then coloured is a synonym for "not white", and "ideas are coloured" should be the same as "ideas are not white", which we expect to be the same as the negation of "ideas are white" and hence true.
The "looseness" I spoke of in an earlier post (somewhere) might help here, because it preserves all the classical logical relationships.
We just say that category mistakes still yield truth values, but the truth value is not defined (which is not the same as having an "undefined" third truth value).
In my formal treatment of izzing and hazzing, which is essentially done in two valued logic, I wrote the definitions so that they come out definitely false if the obvious criteria for truth fail.
It would be easy in that context to give a loose specification.
I didn't do that because I couldn't really see any advantages in that course, and I am not yet aware of anything in Aristotle to convince me that he would have intended something like that.
As to finding the way forward from categories as exegesis of Aristotle to something closer to absolute metaphysics, I don't yet see how that could be done, and don't want to presume that it can be. I am resistant mainly because I don't see the categories of achieving what they aimed to achieve, and so that makes them poor candidates for consideration as absolute.
On the exegetical side I have my formalisation in Aristotle's Logic and Metaphysics, and I do hope that I will eventually get back and move that forward, and I am certainly interested in what Grice might have to say about what true metaphysics can be mined from it, but rather expect that Carnap and I (even after I have persuaded him to be less dogmatic in his use of the word "metaphysics") will be parsimonious users of the term.
On the Gricean view that systematic error is impossible (I am interested to know where we find that in Aristotle) I am not wholly convinced.
Of course it depends what systematic means here.
It seems to me that many commonly held beliefs are false, but what would count as "systematically false"?
There is of course a big difference between systematic error about the meaning of language and systematic error about some matter of fact, but it is surely the latter and least plausible of the two which would have to be denied to give absolute metaphysics?
So I definitely would want to see more to persuade me we were grasping something absolute.
AS to Quine's "On what there is?", there is little hope of carrying Carnap forward on that basis, not least because this paper is pretty much the antithesis of Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" which is the very heart of Carnap's enterprise (IMO).
Quine says that we are "committed" to the existence of all the entities over which "our" quantifiers range.
Carnap says that the (external) question of whether the entities over which some language quantifies is meaningless (at first, later, lacking cognitive content).
Being sure whether they are strictly contradicting each other is not wholly straightforward because Quine doesn't accept the internal/external distinction and Quine's holism makes it uncertain whether he ever really is talking about absolutes rather than expedients. But nevertheless, the informal thrust are opposite.
Even if Quine's holism admitted metaphysics, I could not give credence as absolute to a metaphysic justified by Quine's holism. I should myself be inclined to treat it on a par with descriptive metaphysics, and expect some kind of additional argument in favour of taking any of it as absolute.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Re: The metaphysical status of categories
Speranza
Jones writes:
"We are reminded by recent postings that categories were significant in Grice's writings about metaphysics. Here, on the road to, "The City of Eternal Truth" some importance should be attached to exactly what kinds of metaphysics are at stake, for some, perhaps even most, risk being local and perhaps even arbitrary. The word absolute is good for the inner core of true metaphysics."
I agree. One has to look for a good antonym, too. Perhaps 'relative' is not quite the antonym. I would think an etymological inquiry into 'absolute' may help (or not). It is cognate with dissolute, I would think!
Jones:
"If we look for the absolute in metaphysics, and in Grice's discussions of metaphysics in particular, it seems to me moot whether Aristotle's categories are good contenders, and it is my purpose in this post to share my reservations on that count. The study of categories in Aristotle's metaphysics undoubtedly is a kind of metaphysics. I am inclined to use the description "exegetical metaphysics".
And if Strawson looks for categories in ordinary language then that sounds like his "descriptive metaphysics". Both of these are at worst just some kind of relative metaphysics, rather than belonging to that absolute core."
I agree. In the case of Aristotle, as Grice knew, the big problem is
"ta legomena"
--- things people say. Grice and Aristotle want to say that 'ta legomena' (e.g. things have causes) are rooted obviously in ordinary language (ordinary Greek, ordinary English). Aristotle and Grice want to say that 'what people say' then cannot be systematically false. So, what looks like arbitrary, or accidental, or relative, ends up solidifying, if that's the word, what looks like an absolute principle ("the principle of causation", say).
In Retrospective Epilogue, Grice discusses this in connection with Urmson: the idea that Oxford analysis (say, Strawson), unlike Athens analysis (what Grice calls the "Athenian dialectic") did not care about the _truth_ of 'ta legomena' "except perhaps Urmson". I would need to revise this.
Jones:
"In the first case relative to particular philosophers or philosophical schools, in the second relative to some particular language."
I agree with that. I found Mundle's "A critique of linguistic philosophy" very interesting in this respect. He criticises Strawson for his "Anglo-linguistic". Just browsing at the Contents lists of that book by Mundle is a pleasure!
Jones:
"In both cases, to move forward to the absolute one might look for arguments that the resulting metaphysics is not merely accidental. In Aristotle the categories play an important role in distinguishing the essential from the accidental. The do so in a quite definite way, true intracategorial predications are necessary, true intercategorial predications are accidental."
I like that. Of course, Jones is playing with Grice:
subcategorial
supracategorial -- the realm of eschatology.
Jones now distinguishes between
intracategorial
and
intercategorial
and he adds Aristotle's square of modality for good measure!
(cfr. Noel Burton Roberts about the implicatures of modality: what must be -- does it fall under 'what MAY be'? I think so) ("Implicature and Modality").
Jones:
"This is an ingenious way of obtaining a more subtle analysis of necessity, than we find in Plato, but it doesn't look convincing in the light of more recent semantic thinking."
Or pragmatic for that matter. Noel Burton-Roberts notes that
"what may be" falls indeed under "what must be". This makes the distintion necessary/non-necessary more pragmatic than anything else:
"You said, "you may"; apparently you meant, "you must"".
"Well, when you inferred, from my "you may", that "you must not", that was YOUR fault. The implicature was cancellable, and only retrievable on the weak basis that I was being fully informative."
---
Jones:
"From that point of view the same predication could be either necessary or accidental, you cannot establish which just by reference to categories.
You need the meaning. If they did succeed then there would be grounds for considering the categories to be metaphysical we need some reason to believe that they are not arbitrary but fundamental, and we need that case to justify the particular collection of categories nominated."
Grice plays with routines here, alla Strawson. One is objectification, or subjectification.
"Her eyes were blue" --- accidental.
But then 'blue' can become a subject:
"the blueness of her eyes was a necessary condition on..." whatever.
Grice thinks that the sub-substantial categories can become subject-items as it were.
Jones:
"One way of looking for that might have been through Ryle's notion of "category mistake". The idea here is that predications can fail to be true in a more radical way than simply being false. If they constitute a category error then it is tempting to say that they are neither true nor false (I don't know whether Ryle did say that)."
I would think he did. Of course, L. Horna and I disagree:
"Virtue is circular" is false.
"Virtue is not circular" is true.
Ryle wants to say that "Virtue is not circular" AND "Virtue is circular" are devoid of a truth-value.
----
A good source here may be Oscar P. Wood, "Essays on Ryle", with contributions by Urmson and Strawson.
Ryle was still a genius and the fact that Flew reprinted most of his genial essays in those influential collections helped the Oxonian analysts of Grice's school to progress (Ryle's book is called "Plato's -- sort of a pilgrim -- progress").
Jones:
"From this perspective this does not look good for Grice, if he wants to avoid truth value gaps." Indeed. Horn discusses category mistakes in "A natural history of negation". He retrieves most of the basic literature. He concludes that 'metalinguistic' negation is involved, but that is not the only explanation. So this is not a terribly serious problem for Grice or the Griceians.
Jones:
"But if category errors are falsehoods, (and if we accept that the categories cannot succeed in capturing the essential/categorial distinction as argued above) then its not clear why we need the categories at all, let alone why they would be absolute."
Well, we may need to explore the meaning-intentions, as it were, of an utterer who does say,
"Virtue is not circular".
Since there is such a thing as a 'vicious circle' (vice as a circle), one could argue that 'there is such a thing as a virtuous circle', and hence, by objectification, that virtue is indeed circular. Or not.
---- So, we may need to proceed case-by-case, when the utterance of a true negation of a false predication ("Virtue is circular") is propounded.
"Caesar is a prime number".
In context, of course, "Caesar, the Roman general, was not a prime number". But this may require qualification. If Caesar did happen to be a _number_ (and a 'prime' one at that -- or "Caesar" may be the proper name that some mathematician assigns to some high prime number -- cfr. Fermat), then "Caesar is not a prime number" would not be true, but false, and so on.
---- We may need a schema for all that, in more abstract or formal terms. For category C1 and Category C2, the category mistake, of the form C1/C2 is false iff... and thus the negation of that falsehood is, q. e. d., true.
---
Jones:
"To a programmer the system of categories looks like a prototype of a programming language type system. In that case we do have the situation that type-incorrect programs or expression do lack a value, which is a truth value gap for a boolean expression. But we also have the case that type-systems are dispensable (in favour of type-free programming languages), and by this analogy we might consider categories disposable in favour of a category-free ontology. The tendency of these considerations, if we were to take them seriously, would be to suggest that the absolute is as hard to pin down as we might have expected it to be. Would Grice have cared about this distinction?"
He would!
I like the way you propose two alternate analysis in terms of the programming approach. Both may need exploration.
Again, we may need a more formal generalisation.
For categories C1 and C2, say.
What sort of formalisation in, say, first-order predicate calculus, are we talking about? Are we introducing range of variables: x, y, ...
Why is "Caesar is not a prime number" true? What falls under the range of 'prime number'.
What is an individual? These Quinean questions do seem to be at the core of what ontological commitment we are ready to assume. I realise that Jones is not too sympathetic towards Quinean analyses (seeing that Quine took most of the stuff from Carnap, without crediting it), but "On what there is" may be a good start.
This particular paper was influential with Strawson: "A logician's landscape". So the point, as we recall Grice's response to Strawson: cherry trees in spring (rather than dismantled desert landscapes) may be at the core of the 'ontology' one cares to defend. Or not!
Cheers.
Jones writes:
"We are reminded by recent postings that categories were significant in Grice's writings about metaphysics. Here, on the road to, "The City of Eternal Truth" some importance should be attached to exactly what kinds of metaphysics are at stake, for some, perhaps even most, risk being local and perhaps even arbitrary. The word absolute is good for the inner core of true metaphysics."
I agree. One has to look for a good antonym, too. Perhaps 'relative' is not quite the antonym. I would think an etymological inquiry into 'absolute' may help (or not). It is cognate with dissolute, I would think!
Jones:
"If we look for the absolute in metaphysics, and in Grice's discussions of metaphysics in particular, it seems to me moot whether Aristotle's categories are good contenders, and it is my purpose in this post to share my reservations on that count. The study of categories in Aristotle's metaphysics undoubtedly is a kind of metaphysics. I am inclined to use the description "exegetical metaphysics".
And if Strawson looks for categories in ordinary language then that sounds like his "descriptive metaphysics". Both of these are at worst just some kind of relative metaphysics, rather than belonging to that absolute core."
I agree. In the case of Aristotle, as Grice knew, the big problem is
"ta legomena"
--- things people say. Grice and Aristotle want to say that 'ta legomena' (e.g. things have causes) are rooted obviously in ordinary language (ordinary Greek, ordinary English). Aristotle and Grice want to say that 'what people say' then cannot be systematically false. So, what looks like arbitrary, or accidental, or relative, ends up solidifying, if that's the word, what looks like an absolute principle ("the principle of causation", say).
In Retrospective Epilogue, Grice discusses this in connection with Urmson: the idea that Oxford analysis (say, Strawson), unlike Athens analysis (what Grice calls the "Athenian dialectic") did not care about the _truth_ of 'ta legomena' "except perhaps Urmson". I would need to revise this.
Jones:
"In the first case relative to particular philosophers or philosophical schools, in the second relative to some particular language."
I agree with that. I found Mundle's "A critique of linguistic philosophy" very interesting in this respect. He criticises Strawson for his "Anglo-linguistic". Just browsing at the Contents lists of that book by Mundle is a pleasure!
Jones:
"In both cases, to move forward to the absolute one might look for arguments that the resulting metaphysics is not merely accidental. In Aristotle the categories play an important role in distinguishing the essential from the accidental. The do so in a quite definite way, true intracategorial predications are necessary, true intercategorial predications are accidental."
I like that. Of course, Jones is playing with Grice:
subcategorial
supracategorial -- the realm of eschatology.
Jones now distinguishes between
intracategorial
and
intercategorial
and he adds Aristotle's square of modality for good measure!
(cfr. Noel Burton Roberts about the implicatures of modality: what must be -- does it fall under 'what MAY be'? I think so) ("Implicature and Modality").
Jones:
"This is an ingenious way of obtaining a more subtle analysis of necessity, than we find in Plato, but it doesn't look convincing in the light of more recent semantic thinking."
Or pragmatic for that matter. Noel Burton-Roberts notes that
"what may be" falls indeed under "what must be". This makes the distintion necessary/non-necessary more pragmatic than anything else:
"You said, "you may"; apparently you meant, "you must"".
"Well, when you inferred, from my "you may", that "you must not", that was YOUR fault. The implicature was cancellable, and only retrievable on the weak basis that I was being fully informative."
---
Jones:
"From that point of view the same predication could be either necessary or accidental, you cannot establish which just by reference to categories.
You need the meaning. If they did succeed then there would be grounds for considering the categories to be metaphysical we need some reason to believe that they are not arbitrary but fundamental, and we need that case to justify the particular collection of categories nominated."
Grice plays with routines here, alla Strawson. One is objectification, or subjectification.
"Her eyes were blue" --- accidental.
But then 'blue' can become a subject:
"the blueness of her eyes was a necessary condition on..." whatever.
Grice thinks that the sub-substantial categories can become subject-items as it were.
Jones:
"One way of looking for that might have been through Ryle's notion of "category mistake". The idea here is that predications can fail to be true in a more radical way than simply being false. If they constitute a category error then it is tempting to say that they are neither true nor false (I don't know whether Ryle did say that)."
I would think he did. Of course, L. Horna and I disagree:
"Virtue is circular" is false.
"Virtue is not circular" is true.
Ryle wants to say that "Virtue is not circular" AND "Virtue is circular" are devoid of a truth-value.
----
A good source here may be Oscar P. Wood, "Essays on Ryle", with contributions by Urmson and Strawson.
Ryle was still a genius and the fact that Flew reprinted most of his genial essays in those influential collections helped the Oxonian analysts of Grice's school to progress (Ryle's book is called "Plato's -- sort of a pilgrim -- progress").
Jones:
"From this perspective this does not look good for Grice, if he wants to avoid truth value gaps." Indeed. Horn discusses category mistakes in "A natural history of negation". He retrieves most of the basic literature. He concludes that 'metalinguistic' negation is involved, but that is not the only explanation. So this is not a terribly serious problem for Grice or the Griceians.
Jones:
"But if category errors are falsehoods, (and if we accept that the categories cannot succeed in capturing the essential/categorial distinction as argued above) then its not clear why we need the categories at all, let alone why they would be absolute."
Well, we may need to explore the meaning-intentions, as it were, of an utterer who does say,
"Virtue is not circular".
Since there is such a thing as a 'vicious circle' (vice as a circle), one could argue that 'there is such a thing as a virtuous circle', and hence, by objectification, that virtue is indeed circular. Or not.
---- So, we may need to proceed case-by-case, when the utterance of a true negation of a false predication ("Virtue is circular") is propounded.
"Caesar is a prime number".
In context, of course, "Caesar, the Roman general, was not a prime number". But this may require qualification. If Caesar did happen to be a _number_ (and a 'prime' one at that -- or "Caesar" may be the proper name that some mathematician assigns to some high prime number -- cfr. Fermat), then "Caesar is not a prime number" would not be true, but false, and so on.
---- We may need a schema for all that, in more abstract or formal terms. For category C1 and Category C2, the category mistake, of the form C1/C2 is false iff... and thus the negation of that falsehood is, q. e. d., true.
---
Jones:
"To a programmer the system of categories looks like a prototype of a programming language type system. In that case we do have the situation that type-incorrect programs or expression do lack a value, which is a truth value gap for a boolean expression. But we also have the case that type-systems are dispensable (in favour of type-free programming languages), and by this analogy we might consider categories disposable in favour of a category-free ontology. The tendency of these considerations, if we were to take them seriously, would be to suggest that the absolute is as hard to pin down as we might have expected it to be. Would Grice have cared about this distinction?"
He would!
I like the way you propose two alternate analysis in terms of the programming approach. Both may need exploration.
Again, we may need a more formal generalisation.
For categories C1 and C2, say.
What sort of formalisation in, say, first-order predicate calculus, are we talking about? Are we introducing range of variables: x, y, ...
Why is "Caesar is not a prime number" true? What falls under the range of 'prime number'.
What is an individual? These Quinean questions do seem to be at the core of what ontological commitment we are ready to assume. I realise that Jones is not too sympathetic towards Quinean analyses (seeing that Quine took most of the stuff from Carnap, without crediting it), but "On what there is" may be a good start.
This particular paper was influential with Strawson: "A logician's landscape". So the point, as we recall Grice's response to Strawson: cherry trees in spring (rather than dismantled desert landscapes) may be at the core of the 'ontology' one cares to defend. Or not!
Cheers.
The metaphysical status of categories
We are reminded by recent postings that categories were significant in Grice's writings about metaphysics.
Here, on the road to, "The City of Eternal Truth" some importance should be attached to exactly what kinds of metaphysics are at stake, for some, perhaps even most, risk being local and perhaps even arbitrary.
The word absolute is good for the inner core of true metaphysics.
If we look for the absolute in metaphysics, and in Grice's discussions of metaphysics in particular, it seems to me moot whether Aristotle's categories are good contenders, and it is my purpose in this post to share my reservations on that count.
The study of categories in Aristotle's metaphysics undoubtedly is a kind of metaphysics. I am inclined to use the description "exegetical metaphysics".
And if Strawson looks for categories in ordinary language then that sounds like his "descriptive metaphysics". Both of these are at worst just some kind of relative metaphysics, rather than belonging to that absolute core. In the first case relative to particular philosophers or philosophical schools, in the second relative to some particular language. In both cases, to move forward to the absolute one might look for arguments that the resulting metaphysics is not merely accidental.
In Aristotle the categories play an important role in distinguishing the essential from the accidental. The do so in a quite definite way, true intracategorial predications are necessary, true intercategorial predications are accidental.
This is an ingenious way of obtaining a more subtle analysis of necessity, than we find in Plato, but it doesn't look convincing in the light of more recent semantic thinking. From that point of view the same predication could be either necessary or accidental, you cannot establish which just by reference to categories.
You need the meaning.
If they did succeed then there would be grounds for considering the categories to be metaphysical we need some reason to believe that they are not arbitrary but fundamental, and we need that case to justify the particular collection of categories nominated.
One way of looking for that might have been through Ryle's notion of "category mistake". The idea here is that predications can fail to be true in a more radical way than simply being false. If they constitute a category error then it is tempting to say that they are neither true nor false (I don't know whether Ryle did say that). From this perspective this does not look good for Grice, if he wants to avoid truth value gaps.
But if category errors are falsehoods, (and if we accept that the categories cannot succeed in capturing the essential/categorial distinction as argued above) then its not clear why we need the categories at all, let alone why they would be absolute.
To a programmer the system of categories looks like a prototype of a programming language type system. In that case we do have the situation that type-incorrect programs or expression do lack a value, which is a truth value gap for a boolean expression. But we also have the case that type-systems are dispensable (in favour of type-free programming languages), and by this analogy we might consider categories disposable in favour of a category-free ontology,
The tendency of these considerations, if we were to take them seriously, would be to suggest that the absolute is as hard to pin down as we might have expected it to be,
Would Grice have cared about this distinction?
RBJ
Here, on the road to, "The City of Eternal Truth" some importance should be attached to exactly what kinds of metaphysics are at stake, for some, perhaps even most, risk being local and perhaps even arbitrary.
The word absolute is good for the inner core of true metaphysics.
If we look for the absolute in metaphysics, and in Grice's discussions of metaphysics in particular, it seems to me moot whether Aristotle's categories are good contenders, and it is my purpose in this post to share my reservations on that count.
The study of categories in Aristotle's metaphysics undoubtedly is a kind of metaphysics. I am inclined to use the description "exegetical metaphysics".
And if Strawson looks for categories in ordinary language then that sounds like his "descriptive metaphysics". Both of these are at worst just some kind of relative metaphysics, rather than belonging to that absolute core. In the first case relative to particular philosophers or philosophical schools, in the second relative to some particular language. In both cases, to move forward to the absolute one might look for arguments that the resulting metaphysics is not merely accidental.
In Aristotle the categories play an important role in distinguishing the essential from the accidental. The do so in a quite definite way, true intracategorial predications are necessary, true intercategorial predications are accidental.
This is an ingenious way of obtaining a more subtle analysis of necessity, than we find in Plato, but it doesn't look convincing in the light of more recent semantic thinking. From that point of view the same predication could be either necessary or accidental, you cannot establish which just by reference to categories.
You need the meaning.
If they did succeed then there would be grounds for considering the categories to be metaphysical we need some reason to believe that they are not arbitrary but fundamental, and we need that case to justify the particular collection of categories nominated.
One way of looking for that might have been through Ryle's notion of "category mistake". The idea here is that predications can fail to be true in a more radical way than simply being false. If they constitute a category error then it is tempting to say that they are neither true nor false (I don't know whether Ryle did say that). From this perspective this does not look good for Grice, if he wants to avoid truth value gaps.
But if category errors are falsehoods, (and if we accept that the categories cannot succeed in capturing the essential/categorial distinction as argued above) then its not clear why we need the categories at all, let alone why they would be absolute.
To a programmer the system of categories looks like a prototype of a programming language type system. In that case we do have the situation that type-incorrect programs or expression do lack a value, which is a truth value gap for a boolean expression. But we also have the case that type-systems are dispensable (in favour of type-free programming languages), and by this analogy we might consider categories disposable in favour of a category-free ontology,
The tendency of these considerations, if we were to take them seriously, would be to suggest that the absolute is as hard to pin down as we might have expected it to be,
Would Grice have cared about this distinction?
RBJ
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Re: Eschatology and Metaphysics
Speranza
Jones writes:
"It is nice that Grice uses a special word "eschatology" for (at least some of) his metaphysical ruminations, since that makes it easier to talk about the different conceptions of metaphysics that Carnap and Grice have, and slightly easier to find a way of talking about them both at once."
Good. It is perhaps not so nice (but then, 'nice', in Latin, meant 'silly', almost -- ne-scius, don't-know-it-all) that Grice does not use
"ontology" -- at least in that essay. He just speaks broadly of 'metaphysics' as categorial and eschatology as supracategoria.
This may be compensated by the long ruminations he has on "theory theory" in "Reply to Richards". I may have posted some of that material at the Grice Club. By "Theory Theory" he just means Aristotle's "prote philosophia", first philosophy.
But, as I see things, Grice is best to allow to understand Carnap in NOT distinguishing too much between 'philosophy' and 'science', so distinctions in the discipline of metaphysics is of secondary importance to him.
My favourite Grice quote must be his reaction to Russell's dismissal of 'metaphysics' as "stone-age metaphysics". Russell was replying to Strawson ("Mr. Strawson on referring") and other issues. Russell notes that ordinary language (silly things silly people say, I think is his expression) embodies a "stone age metaphysics". Grice, in "Reply to Richards", replies: "lovely rhetoric; but why not, 'stone-age PHYSICS'?"
Grice's most developed arguments come from "Actions and Events", where he refers to entities like electrons, and wavicles (his "Two Tables by Eddington" argument -- cfr. my "Cake-Eat and Have-It" principle, sometime).
There is also a good quote from "Method in philosophical psychology" that Jones and I have discussed elsewhere -- at Bayne's site --: Grice's "Ontological Marxism": how to bring entities into the picture. This may not just refer to 'universalia'. In fact, in "Action and Events" he expands on this, and quotes from Robinson, an Oxford don at Oriel: "You name it". This was Robinson's criterion for ontological acceptance: you name it and I deem it existent, as it were.
As we proceed on this, consider -- Heidegger's silly phrase as examined by Carnap:
"Nothing noughts".
"Das Nichts nichtet."
"Nothing" is possibly supracategorial. It's not like 'table' and 'chair'. To allow for 'Nothing' to stand as a subject-item is quite a challenge, and a feat!
Now, to add, as predicate-term, the so-far unexistent term, "to nought" (nichten), was Heidegger's contribution.
Is it true that Nothing noughts? Carnap just found it nonsensical. Alla, "Caesar is a prime number", or "If they but they they so so they" -- a breach of syntax.
In allowing for eschatology, perhaps Grice is saying that there may be something behind this apparently silly claim by whom he considers "the greatest living philosopher" (jokingly, in WoW:i -- Heidegger in name index).
Jones goes on:
"So far as Aristotle is concerned, the word metaphysics doesn't really come in, because it only appeared after Aristotle, his contribution being just the order in which his books came (I have no idea whether even that really was down to Aristotle). What Aristotle called the contents of the book which we call the Metaphysics was "First Philosophy" which sounds just like an opposite of "Eschatology"."
Good you mention this. As I say, Grice used 'theory theory' extensively. I think he did mean 'first philosophy' -- prote philosophia. The point being about the principles or 'arkhai', of course. It is true that there is no mention of this in the "Eschatology" essay by Grice, but I may have provided at the Grice Club some relevant quotes about his "theory theory". It is a erudite expression enough, "theory theory", to allow for an easy search, sometime!
----
Incidentally, the "Eschatology" paper is concerned with very specific issues, as I re-read it. Grice uses Baker's application of 'eschatology' to show that Aristotle reaches an 'aporia' with the theory of the 'alter ego'. The way Grice finds this interesting is interesting. Why a metaphysician, as it were, may find eschatology practical to 'save' the appearances, and avoid consistencies. "Theory theory", as it were? His own application concerns the word 'right'. This relates to "Reply to Richards". There, he notes that when we say, say
mind is prior to matter.
matter is prior to mind.
and so on, there may be different 'levels' or directions: ontological, cognitive, epistemological, valuational. The possibility of these different schemata may concern the eschatologist, who is now dealing with supracategorial epithets, as it were.
----
Jones goes on:
"This is probably just a curiosity, since there isn't much doubt that Aristotle was thinking of "First Philosophy" as being "ultimate" in some sense or other."
Indeed, a bit of a pun. What strikes me as odd is that there should be more than one 'principle'. The word 'principle' (the formulation of which is the task of 'prote philosophia') seems like to disallow the use of the plural. "The principles of ...", and so on. In old Latin, it meant just 'start'. And how different starting points can there be?
Jones:
"In Speranza's story about Grice's philosophical eschatology, it seems that Aristotle's categories loom large."
Indeed. I would think this is the keyword in Kantotle or Ariskant. Recall that what is an ontological realm for Aristotle, is merely cognitive or epistemological for Kant. Grice amused himself with Kant's treatment of Aristotle's categories. Consider just the quartette:
qualitas
quantitas
relatio
modus
--- what is the criterion to distinguish the category of 'quantitas' from that of 'qualitas', say?
Kant notably thought that Aristotle had posited 6 categories too many. So, Aristotle's ten categories become just four in Kant -- and jokingly, in the Grice of "Logic and Conversation". Note that the first category does not count as one in Kant: the substance. It's with 'qualitas/quantitas' that we start the 'categorial' game in Kant, since 'substance' is too much of a scholastic metaphysical (Jones is right that 'metaphysical' is post-Aristotelian -- Kant may be having Baumgarten's terminology in mind) term to care for...
The category of 'relatio' is an interesting one, and one that was later to be formalised by Russell
Rx
R(x, y)
R(x, y, z)
symmetry, transitivity, etc., all applied to 'relatio' as such.
Modus is more of a mixed bag!
---
Recall that in Grandy's and Warner's festschrift
P hilosohpical
G rounds of
R ationality
I ntentions
C ategories
E nds
the "C" is key!
Jones:
"I suppose this is understandable in the context of Ryle making a big deal about category mistakes, but it sounds more like descriptive or exegetical metaphysics than "revisionist" metaphysics, which is probably where we need to be to escape accident and language and home in on essence and the absolute."
Too true. Perhaps the word 'absolute' is overrated, though. True, Collingwood (whose prose Jones charmingly finds 'horrifying') does think of 'metaphysics' as (pretentiously) the 'science of absolute presuppositions'. But one wonders what a 'relative' presupposition would look like. Grice (and myself, for that matter) is a thorough constructivist. So he thinks that whatever we may end (unluckily) deeming an 'absolute' presupposition is still something we've constructed out of our own relativities...
Jones:
"So far I don't have a good idea of how Grice is separates out the truly eschatological from the accidents of descriptive metaphysics."
The "Reply to Richards" section on 'stone age physics' is a good start. He grants that Russell is being too rhetorical, and that
"S is P"
say, Aristotelian, or Kantotelian categories, refer to 'stone age metaphysics'. Russell may be thinking of, and indeed explicitly refers to 'twentieth-century physics', as needing a DIFFERENT metaphysical scheme.
So, Grice grants this, and makes a few points. A few of those points are descriptive. He notes that we may accept the study of 'stone age physics' as a legitimate HISTORICAL discipline. How people talked of and thought of the world before Einstein, say.
He then goes to refer to these categories not as being 'conversational' as he charmingly had it in "Logic and Conversation" but just _linguistic_. I like to read that in connection with Strawson's lectures on "Subject and Predicate in Grammar and Logic". For Grice is surely defending vintage Oxford analysis: if people do use 'subject and predicate' logic (rather than a pure predicate calculus, say), and if they also allow for different 'orders' (as when 'nothing' or 'blueness' becomes a subject-item, say), or when 'right' is used valuationally rather than epistemological, we may want to pay attention to the logic behind this. So this is the metaphysicist as a 'descriptive' grammarian, as it were.
Some unpublications of Grice at the Bancroft Library (UC/Berkeley) refer to his 'new method' or 'discourse' in metaphysics: from Genesis to Revelations, I think he called it -- in truly eschatological verbal fashion. So, he did think that the philosopher should go beyond the accidents of grammar, as it were, to the absolute, or the Snark if you must!
("For the Snark was a boojum, you see" -- Gardner has edited Lewis Carroll's work as an analysis of a neo-Hegelian search for the absolute).
Cheers.
Jones writes:
"It is nice that Grice uses a special word "eschatology" for (at least some of) his metaphysical ruminations, since that makes it easier to talk about the different conceptions of metaphysics that Carnap and Grice have, and slightly easier to find a way of talking about them both at once."
Good. It is perhaps not so nice (but then, 'nice', in Latin, meant 'silly', almost -- ne-scius, don't-know-it-all) that Grice does not use
"ontology" -- at least in that essay. He just speaks broadly of 'metaphysics' as categorial and eschatology as supracategoria.
This may be compensated by the long ruminations he has on "theory theory" in "Reply to Richards". I may have posted some of that material at the Grice Club. By "Theory Theory" he just means Aristotle's "prote philosophia", first philosophy.
But, as I see things, Grice is best to allow to understand Carnap in NOT distinguishing too much between 'philosophy' and 'science', so distinctions in the discipline of metaphysics is of secondary importance to him.
My favourite Grice quote must be his reaction to Russell's dismissal of 'metaphysics' as "stone-age metaphysics". Russell was replying to Strawson ("Mr. Strawson on referring") and other issues. Russell notes that ordinary language (silly things silly people say, I think is his expression) embodies a "stone age metaphysics". Grice, in "Reply to Richards", replies: "lovely rhetoric; but why not, 'stone-age PHYSICS'?"
Grice's most developed arguments come from "Actions and Events", where he refers to entities like electrons, and wavicles (his "Two Tables by Eddington" argument -- cfr. my "Cake-Eat and Have-It" principle, sometime).
There is also a good quote from "Method in philosophical psychology" that Jones and I have discussed elsewhere -- at Bayne's site --: Grice's "Ontological Marxism": how to bring entities into the picture. This may not just refer to 'universalia'. In fact, in "Action and Events" he expands on this, and quotes from Robinson, an Oxford don at Oriel: "You name it". This was Robinson's criterion for ontological acceptance: you name it and I deem it existent, as it were.
As we proceed on this, consider -- Heidegger's silly phrase as examined by Carnap:
"Nothing noughts".
"Das Nichts nichtet."
"Nothing" is possibly supracategorial. It's not like 'table' and 'chair'. To allow for 'Nothing' to stand as a subject-item is quite a challenge, and a feat!
Now, to add, as predicate-term, the so-far unexistent term, "to nought" (nichten), was Heidegger's contribution.
Is it true that Nothing noughts? Carnap just found it nonsensical. Alla, "Caesar is a prime number", or "If they but they they so so they" -- a breach of syntax.
In allowing for eschatology, perhaps Grice is saying that there may be something behind this apparently silly claim by whom he considers "the greatest living philosopher" (jokingly, in WoW:i -- Heidegger in name index).
Jones goes on:
"So far as Aristotle is concerned, the word metaphysics doesn't really come in, because it only appeared after Aristotle, his contribution being just the order in which his books came (I have no idea whether even that really was down to Aristotle). What Aristotle called the contents of the book which we call the Metaphysics was "First Philosophy" which sounds just like an opposite of "Eschatology"."
Good you mention this. As I say, Grice used 'theory theory' extensively. I think he did mean 'first philosophy' -- prote philosophia. The point being about the principles or 'arkhai', of course. It is true that there is no mention of this in the "Eschatology" essay by Grice, but I may have provided at the Grice Club some relevant quotes about his "theory theory". It is a erudite expression enough, "theory theory", to allow for an easy search, sometime!
----
Incidentally, the "Eschatology" paper is concerned with very specific issues, as I re-read it. Grice uses Baker's application of 'eschatology' to show that Aristotle reaches an 'aporia' with the theory of the 'alter ego'. The way Grice finds this interesting is interesting. Why a metaphysician, as it were, may find eschatology practical to 'save' the appearances, and avoid consistencies. "Theory theory", as it were? His own application concerns the word 'right'. This relates to "Reply to Richards". There, he notes that when we say, say
mind is prior to matter.
matter is prior to mind.
and so on, there may be different 'levels' or directions: ontological, cognitive, epistemological, valuational. The possibility of these different schemata may concern the eschatologist, who is now dealing with supracategorial epithets, as it were.
----
Jones goes on:
"This is probably just a curiosity, since there isn't much doubt that Aristotle was thinking of "First Philosophy" as being "ultimate" in some sense or other."
Indeed, a bit of a pun. What strikes me as odd is that there should be more than one 'principle'. The word 'principle' (the formulation of which is the task of 'prote philosophia') seems like to disallow the use of the plural. "The principles of ...", and so on. In old Latin, it meant just 'start'. And how different starting points can there be?
Jones:
"In Speranza's story about Grice's philosophical eschatology, it seems that Aristotle's categories loom large."
Indeed. I would think this is the keyword in Kantotle or Ariskant. Recall that what is an ontological realm for Aristotle, is merely cognitive or epistemological for Kant. Grice amused himself with Kant's treatment of Aristotle's categories. Consider just the quartette:
qualitas
quantitas
relatio
modus
--- what is the criterion to distinguish the category of 'quantitas' from that of 'qualitas', say?
Kant notably thought that Aristotle had posited 6 categories too many. So, Aristotle's ten categories become just four in Kant -- and jokingly, in the Grice of "Logic and Conversation". Note that the first category does not count as one in Kant: the substance. It's with 'qualitas/quantitas' that we start the 'categorial' game in Kant, since 'substance' is too much of a scholastic metaphysical (Jones is right that 'metaphysical' is post-Aristotelian -- Kant may be having Baumgarten's terminology in mind) term to care for...
The category of 'relatio' is an interesting one, and one that was later to be formalised by Russell
Rx
R(x, y)
R(x, y, z)
symmetry, transitivity, etc., all applied to 'relatio' as such.
Modus is more of a mixed bag!
---
Recall that in Grandy's and Warner's festschrift
P hilosohpical
G rounds of
R ationality
I ntentions
C ategories
E nds
the "C" is key!
Jones:
"I suppose this is understandable in the context of Ryle making a big deal about category mistakes, but it sounds more like descriptive or exegetical metaphysics than "revisionist" metaphysics, which is probably where we need to be to escape accident and language and home in on essence and the absolute."
Too true. Perhaps the word 'absolute' is overrated, though. True, Collingwood (whose prose Jones charmingly finds 'horrifying') does think of 'metaphysics' as (pretentiously) the 'science of absolute presuppositions'. But one wonders what a 'relative' presupposition would look like. Grice (and myself, for that matter) is a thorough constructivist. So he thinks that whatever we may end (unluckily) deeming an 'absolute' presupposition is still something we've constructed out of our own relativities...
Jones:
"So far I don't have a good idea of how Grice is separates out the truly eschatological from the accidents of descriptive metaphysics."
The "Reply to Richards" section on 'stone age physics' is a good start. He grants that Russell is being too rhetorical, and that
"S is P"
say, Aristotelian, or Kantotelian categories, refer to 'stone age metaphysics'. Russell may be thinking of, and indeed explicitly refers to 'twentieth-century physics', as needing a DIFFERENT metaphysical scheme.
So, Grice grants this, and makes a few points. A few of those points are descriptive. He notes that we may accept the study of 'stone age physics' as a legitimate HISTORICAL discipline. How people talked of and thought of the world before Einstein, say.
He then goes to refer to these categories not as being 'conversational' as he charmingly had it in "Logic and Conversation" but just _linguistic_. I like to read that in connection with Strawson's lectures on "Subject and Predicate in Grammar and Logic". For Grice is surely defending vintage Oxford analysis: if people do use 'subject and predicate' logic (rather than a pure predicate calculus, say), and if they also allow for different 'orders' (as when 'nothing' or 'blueness' becomes a subject-item, say), or when 'right' is used valuationally rather than epistemological, we may want to pay attention to the logic behind this. So this is the metaphysicist as a 'descriptive' grammarian, as it were.
Some unpublications of Grice at the Bancroft Library (UC/Berkeley) refer to his 'new method' or 'discourse' in metaphysics: from Genesis to Revelations, I think he called it -- in truly eschatological verbal fashion. So, he did think that the philosopher should go beyond the accidents of grammar, as it were, to the absolute, or the Snark if you must!
("For the Snark was a boojum, you see" -- Gardner has edited Lewis Carroll's work as an analysis of a neo-Hegelian search for the absolute).
Cheers.
Eschatology and Metphysics
It is nice that Grice uses a special word "eschatology" for (at least some of) his metaphysical ruminations, since that makes it easier to talk about the different conceptions of metaphysics that Carnap and Grice have, and slightly easier to find a way of talking about them both at once.
So far as Aristotle is concerned, the word metaphysics doesn't really come in, because it only appeared after Aristotle, his contribution being just the order in which his books came (I have no idea whether even that really was down to Aristotle). What Aristotle called the contents of the book which we call the Metaphysics was "First Philosophy" which sounds just like an opposite of "Eschatology". This is probably just a curiosity, since there isn't much doubt that Aristotle was thinking of "First Philosophy" as being "ultimate" in some sense or other.
In Speranza's story about Grice's philosophical eschatology, it seems that Aristotle's categories loom large. I suppose this is understandable in the context of Ryle making a big deal about category mistakes, but it sounds more like descriptive or exegetical metaphysics than "revisionist" metaphysics, which is probably where we need to be to escape accident and language and home in on essence and the absolute.
So far I don't have a good idea of how Grice is separates out the truly eschatological from the accidents of descriptive metaphysics.
Roger Jones
So far as Aristotle is concerned, the word metaphysics doesn't really come in, because it only appeared after Aristotle, his contribution being just the order in which his books came (I have no idea whether even that really was down to Aristotle). What Aristotle called the contents of the book which we call the Metaphysics was "First Philosophy" which sounds just like an opposite of "Eschatology". This is probably just a curiosity, since there isn't much doubt that Aristotle was thinking of "First Philosophy" as being "ultimate" in some sense or other.
In Speranza's story about Grice's philosophical eschatology, it seems that Aristotle's categories loom large. I suppose this is understandable in the context of Ryle making a big deal about category mistakes, but it sounds more like descriptive or exegetical metaphysics than "revisionist" metaphysics, which is probably where we need to be to escape accident and language and home in on essence and the absolute.
So far I don't have a good idea of how Grice is separates out the truly eschatological from the accidents of descriptive metaphysics.
Roger Jones
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Re: Presupposition and Metaphysics
Speranza
Jones writes that "It's a bit of a handicap having a lousy memory. I see that in the draft "conversation" I had already casually made the connection (between presupposition and metaphysics) by describing (in section 4.5 "Metaphysics") descriptive metaphysics as concerned with metaphysics "as presupposed in ordinary language" (is this how Strawson describes it?)."
I should doublecheck. From what I recall, this was in "Individuals: an essay in descriptive metaphysics", that Grice mentions in "Reply to Richards", indeed.
--- But I wouldn't put too much emphasis on 'presuppose' there. Recall that Strawson is pretty loose when it comes to use 'presuppose'. He did write:
"The king of France is bald" IMPLIES there is a king of France. His presupposition was formerly a mere 'implication', and even Grice, who is much more careful with lingo, has "Have you stopped beating your wife?" as 'implication' in the Section III: Implication, of "Causal theory" in Baynes's website.
---- Of course Jones is right in using 'presupposition' seriously, alla Husserl, and Collingwood ("metaphysics" as 'the science of absolute presuppositions').
Jones:
"So I already have a start, in 4.5, on a comparison of metaphysics in Grice and Carnap, but had not at that stage the opinion I am now moving towards on the importance of a conciliation on metaphysics for "The City". However, I am inclined to start afresh on this, and first to post something on metaphysics on Carnap Corner.
I just noticed that my last post on "one Bete too many" was very badly formatted so I went back and edited it to make it more readable."
Good.
For the historical record, it may do to consult how HEIDEGGER was using 'metaphysic'. When Ayer popularised Carnap's rejection of metaphysics, he (Ayer) was introducing yet another 'sense' to 'metaphysic'.
I am glad to see that Carnap changed from 'meaningless' to jargon about cognitive significance! This is a particular favourite topic of mine, as it connects with Ogden and Richards, and EMOTIVISM, and via Stevenson, to Grice's emphasis on 'non-indicative' uses of 'language'. For
"Close the door!"
"Do not covet thy neighbour's wife!"
would NOT be a matter of indicative-type sort of meaning. It's still different with
"Eating people is wrong."
(I think there is a book on ethics by the title, "Why eating people is wrong." -- and so on).
Cheers.
Jones writes that "It's a bit of a handicap having a lousy memory. I see that in the draft "conversation" I had already casually made the connection (between presupposition and metaphysics) by describing (in section 4.5 "Metaphysics") descriptive metaphysics as concerned with metaphysics "as presupposed in ordinary language" (is this how Strawson describes it?)."
I should doublecheck. From what I recall, this was in "Individuals: an essay in descriptive metaphysics", that Grice mentions in "Reply to Richards", indeed.
--- But I wouldn't put too much emphasis on 'presuppose' there. Recall that Strawson is pretty loose when it comes to use 'presuppose'. He did write:
"The king of France is bald" IMPLIES there is a king of France. His presupposition was formerly a mere 'implication', and even Grice, who is much more careful with lingo, has "Have you stopped beating your wife?" as 'implication' in the Section III: Implication, of "Causal theory" in Baynes's website.
---- Of course Jones is right in using 'presupposition' seriously, alla Husserl, and Collingwood ("metaphysics" as 'the science of absolute presuppositions').
Jones:
"So I already have a start, in 4.5, on a comparison of metaphysics in Grice and Carnap, but had not at that stage the opinion I am now moving towards on the importance of a conciliation on metaphysics for "The City". However, I am inclined to start afresh on this, and first to post something on metaphysics on Carnap Corner.
I just noticed that my last post on "one Bete too many" was very badly formatted so I went back and edited it to make it more readable."
Good.
For the historical record, it may do to consult how HEIDEGGER was using 'metaphysic'. When Ayer popularised Carnap's rejection of metaphysics, he (Ayer) was introducing yet another 'sense' to 'metaphysic'.
I am glad to see that Carnap changed from 'meaningless' to jargon about cognitive significance! This is a particular favourite topic of mine, as it connects with Ogden and Richards, and EMOTIVISM, and via Stevenson, to Grice's emphasis on 'non-indicative' uses of 'language'. For
"Close the door!"
"Do not covet thy neighbour's wife!"
would NOT be a matter of indicative-type sort of meaning. It's still different with
"Eating people is wrong."
(I think there is a book on ethics by the title, "Why eating people is wrong." -- and so on).
Cheers.
Re: from language to metaphysics
Speranza
This is a running commentary on Jones's recent post.
Jones writes:
"I think we have segued (not sure whether I like that word, but there it is) from vacuous names and truth value gaps at the Grice Club, via the notion of presupposition, with the assistance of Collingwood, into metaphysics here at The City of Eternal Truth. This I think, is a fine thing, and I thought I would just say why (I think its a fine thing) as a preliminary to milking it (at a leisurely pace). Why? Well, reflecting on the matter I concluded that "The City of Eternal Truth" should be, at its most profound, about metaphysics. The blog was invented by Speranza, though the phrase he took (of course) from Grice."
Indeed. Grice playfully quoting from "Pilgrim's Progress".
"And somehow this was supposed to involve Carnap as well. Speranza and I were at the time entering into collaboration on this essay called "a conversation between Carnap and Grice", which might possibly be about to move forward. This is how I now see it.
In the essay the idea was for Carnap and Grice to talk to each other and see whether their differences really were as great as they might at first sight appear.
First of all they have to try to understand each other so as to eliminate apparent, purely verbal, differences, and to work at the remaining apparently substantive disagreements to see whether a resolution of some kind might be possible.
So there is a bit of a focus on differences here. This gentle friction was to be a creative stimulus, a font of new ideas. The City of Eternal Truth is, as a Carnap/Grice enterprise, the other way up. It is a place where we focus on the fundamental issues on which Carnap and Grice might agree, a home for some of those new ideas. Apart from the Carnap/Grice angle, the idea of "Eternal Truth" does seem to push in the direction of metaphysics. It does seem to brush aside transient empirical accidents, including any features of language, natural or formal, which need not have been so. Of course, this still leaves natural laws, but they are for science, and that leaves us with metaphysics for the philosophers. But what hope would there be for a City built around a consensus between Carnap and Grice on metaphysics? At first glance there seems to be no common ground between them here.
I think however that a closer look might yield a more positive outlook, and that this might provide a nice way of moving forward for Speranza and I (Grice*! and Carnap*!, and anyone else interested) on both the "conversation" essay and the City blog. So here is my first take. We have to try to eliminate purely verbal disagreements, which are just obstacles, and then see whether, with some common terminology we can identify some common ground. Of course, we all know that Carnap completely and rather dogmatically rejected metaphysics in toto, whereas Grice was apparently much more liberal. Also we have Carnap quite keen on reductionist enterprises, which Grice calls minimalisms (or was it minimisms?)"
Minimalisms, I would think. "Minimism" is a minimal form of minimalism, if you mustn't. I think Grice refers to ONE Minimalism. I.e. all the -isms he cares to criticise (the 'betes noires' which Pilgrim Grice finds on his way to the City of the Eternal Truth) ARE variations on one single theme: the theme of minimalism.
----
"and thinks of perhaps as some grubby dogmatic empiricist nominalism. Grice on the other hand, is easy with metaphysics. We have him trying to understand Aristotle's metaphysics in a semi-formal way, and as an ordinary language philosopher he probably is OK with the enterprise which Strawson called "descriptive metaphysics" or even with Strawson's other kind (what was it?)."
I think he pretentiously called it 'revisionary'. Surely the antonym of 'descriptive' is _prescriptive_!
"To effect a reconciliation we have to work on both parties, in the first instance about language or terminology, for it seems to me that they really have quite different conceptions of what metaphysics is. There is also the difficulty about what "philosophy" is, but if we sideline value judgements about what philosophers ought to be doing, and bear in mind that Carnap at least was already, as he matured, softening some of his dogmas by refining his language (an example of which is to say "lacking in cognitive significance or content" instead of the bald and uncompromising "meaningless"). I'm going to pause there, to stop message bloat, and come back with some analysis of the different kinds of metaphysics at stake, before attempting to outline some ideas of metaphysics with which they might both be willing to move forward together (if they weren't dead!)."
Grice: "Try those who were great and dead as if they were great _AND LIVING_!" I know Jones did not mean any disrespect.
I love the idea of considering what we are talking about. Perhaps the blame is on Oxford. Back in the day, Collingwood, who wrote, "An essay in metaphysics", was appointed,
"Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy" (there are only three Oxford philo chairs: all oddly starting with "W", White chair of moral philosophy, Wykeham chair of logic, and Waynflete chair of metaphysical philosophy.
I like to think that what _Waynflete_ was up to was the distinction between:
physical philosophy -- YES, most things were deemed 'philosophy' back in the day.
metaphysical philosophy.
In more Romantic (as per Latin/Italian, and the Romance languages) parlance, the distinction between:
natural ------------ physical
trans-natural ------ meta-physical
(It is true that this is reading too much onto Aristotle, who just meant, 'those things which lie _next_ to the physics -- 'ta meta ta physika'.
But I do find the idea of 'trans-naturalia', sort of interesting, if mystic.
----
Now, when discussing about Collingwood's idea of the absolute presuppositions (and metaphysics as the science (or doctrine or discipline) of absolute presuppositions, it may do to revise the scholastic terminology:
There was metaphysica proper (transnaturalia). But there was 'ontologia', and this was considered to be divided into:
ontologia generalis
ontologia specialis----- within the specialis we basically get a "Theory of Everything":
------------ The two branches of 'ontologia specialis' being:
(in that order):
cosmologia
anthropologia
----
Now, for some quotations from Grice's "eschatology" essay in WoW, which Jones can also consult.
Grice is interested in EXTENDING the range of 'metaphysics' qua discipline. He writes:
"Some time ago"
---- this was written in 1987, but knowing Grice's preference for meiosis/litotes, this can well be, "circa 1946":
"the idea occurred to me"
as opposed to somebody else
"that there might be TWO DISTINGUISHABLE
DISCIPLINES each of which might have SOME
claim to the title or, or a share of the
title of, Metaphysics. The first of these
disciplines I thought of as being
CATEGORIAL in character"
-- and comprising Strawson's 'descriptive' and 'revisionary' varieties.
"that is to say, I thought of it as operating
at or BELOW the level of CATEGORIES."
Grice's keyword par excellence.
"Following leads suppplied primarily by
Aristotle and Kant,"
Or Ariskant, as he also called him.
"I conceived of it as concerned with
the identification of the most general
attributes or classifications, the SUMMA GENERA,
under which the various specific subject-items
and/or predicates (predicate-items, attributes)
might fall, and with the
formulation of metaphysical PRINCIPLES
governing such categorial attributes
(for examle some version of a Principle
of Causation, or some principle regulating
the persistence of substances)."
Recall that Collingwood thinks of the Principle of Causation as an 'absolute presupposition'.
Grice continues:
"The SECOND discipline I thought of as being
SUPRACATEGORIAL
in character; it would bring together
DIFFERENT subject-items BENEATH single
classificatory characterisations, and perhaps
would ALSO specificy PRINCIPLES which would have
to be exemplified by items brought together
by this kind of supracategorial assimilation."
Where 'assimilation' is the keyword. A metaphysical sentence belonging to this 'eschatological' branch would have complex truth-conditions, say.
Grice goes on:
"I hoped that the SECOND discipline, which I was tempted
to label"
and he did label
""Philosophical Eschatology"", might provide for
the detection of AFFINITIES between
CATEGORIALLY DIFFERENT REALITIES
--- thus, protecting the principles associated with
_particular_ categories from _suspiction of arbirariness_."
(or vacuity, pace Carnap?)
Grice continues:
"In response to a possibly objection to the
effect that
IF A PAIR OF ITEMS
were REALLY [trouser-word. Speranza]
categorially DIFFERENT
from one another, they could ****NOT****
[on risk of losing 'the bounds of sense', echoing Kant/Strawson]
BE ASSIMILATED
under a single classificatory head (since
they would be incapable of sharing
any attribute [[Jones may like to consider a set-theoretical reversion of this]),
I planned to reply that
EVEN
should it be _impossible_
for categorially different items
to _share_ a single attribute, this
objection might be INCONCLUSIVE
since 'assimilation' might take
the form of ascribing to the items
assimilated NOT A _COMMMON_ attribute
BUT an _ANALOGY_."
Keyword: Greek 'analogia'.
Grice continues:
"Traditionally, in such disciplines as
theology, analogy has been the resort of
those who hoped to find a way of comparing
entities so radically diverse from one
another as God and human beings."
Or cream-in-one's-coffee and personal objects of affection:
"You are like the cream in my coffee."
"You are the cream in my coffee." (discussion under 'metaphor' as conversational implicature, in WoW:ii).
Grice goes on:
"Such a mode of COMPARISON would
of course require careful examination."
Davidson, for example, thinks that
"The moon is made of cheese" is true iff the moon is made of cheese. The uttering of an analogy, a comparison, and a METAPHOR, involve supracategorial floutings to truth-conditional semantics: it's not the uttering of what is literally _false_ that matters.
Grice goes on:
"Such examination I shall for the moment defer,
as I shall also defer mention of certain further
ideas which I associated with philosophical
eschatology"
back in the day -- 'some time ago'.
Grice goes on:
"For a start, then, I might distinguish THREE
DIRECTIONS as being ones in which a philosophical
eschatologist [treading the path towards the City of Eternal Truth, as it were]
might be expected to deploy his energies."
FIRST:
"The provision of generalised
theoretical accounts which UNITE
specialised metaphysical [and why not 'physical' or
scientific? Speranza -- what is _metaphysical_
about the Principle of Causation? Speranza]
principles which are separated from another
by CATEGORY-BARRIERS."
Grice must be amusing himself with what was specially the obsession of another Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy: Gilbert Ryle ("Category mistakes", 'category-barriers' -- the 'mind' and the 'body' as the ultimate 'category mistakes' -- the ghost in the machine).
Grice goes on:
SECOND:
"Fulfilment of such an undertaking
might involve an adequate theoretical
characteristation of a relation of
AFFINITY,
which, like the more familiar
relation of SIMILARITY [if a is identical to a,
is a similar to a? Speranza] offers a foundation
for the generalisation of specialised
regularities, but which, unlike similarity,
is sensitive, or has a high degree of INSENSITIVITY,
to the presence of category-barriers."
Ryle's example: "Saturday is in bed with Monday."
----
Grice goes on: "To suggest the possibility of such a relation is NOT, of course, to CONSTRUCT it, nor even to provide a guarantee that it CAN be constructed."
THIRD:
"An investigation of the notion of
analogy,"
a/b = c/d
A C
---::---
B D
"You are like the cream in my coffee"
"and a delineation of its links
with other seemingly comparable
notions, such as METAPHOR, and PARABLE. Can this
list be expanded?"
Yes: disimplicature. "You're the cream in my coffee" Grice has, elsewhere, as the epitome of the disimplicature. So, even in the descriptive realm of metaphysics of the analysis of ordinary language use, one has to provide for the fact that utterers _disimplicate_ by what they say, never mind _mean_!
Grice:
"At his point I turn to a paper by
Judith Baker, entitled, "Another Self": Aristotle
on friendship."
Grice:
"On the present occasion, my concern is
focused on METHODOLOGICAL"
rather than substantive
"questions; so I propose first to consider
the ideas about METHODOLOGY, in particular
Aritotle's methodology, ... and then to
inquire whether these ideas suggest any
additions to the prospective subject matter
of philosophical eschatology. ... Baker
suggests that Aristotle's philosophical
method, .... treats the existence of a
common consensus of opinions with respect
to a proposition as conferring at least
provisional validity (validity ceteris paribus)
upon the proposition in question."
---- "Implicatures happen."
Grice goes on:
"In general, no external [Carnap's sense? I think so! Spernza] justification
of the acceptance of the objects of universal agreement is called for. This idea
has not always been accepted by philsoophers."
... excursus on Moore.
"If my perception of Moore is correct,
he would in Aristotle's view have been looking for
an EXTERNAL justification for the
acceptance of the deliverances of common sense where
none is required."
--- Ditto for "science"
Grice on
Eddington's table (cited elsewhere in The Grice Club) in "Actions and Events". Why accept the atomic table as the _real_ table?, and so on.
Grice goes on:
"Though no EXTERNAL justification is
required for accepting the validity
of propositions which are generally or
universally believed, the validity
in question is only provisional. For a
common consensus may be undermined
in either of two ways."
FIRST:
"There may be a common consensus that
proposition A is true, but there may be
two mutually inconsistent propositions,
B1 and B2, where while there is a common consensus
that either B1 or B2 is true, there is no common
consensus concerning the truth of B1 or the truth
of B2; there are, so to speak, two schools
of thought, one favouring B1 and one favouring
B2. Furthermore (we may suppose) the combination
of B1 with A will yield C1, whereas the combination
of B2 with A will yield C2; and C2 and C2 are
mutually inconsistent. In such a tiatuion it
becomes a question whether the acceptability
of A is LEFT INTACT. If it is, a method will
have to be devided for deciding between B1 and B2."
SECOND:
"To cope with problems created by the apperance
on the scene of conflicts or other stumbling blocks
the theorist may be expected to systematise
the data which are vouched for by
common consensus by himself devising general
propositions which are embedded in his theory. Such
generalities will NOT be directly attested
by the consensus, but their
ACCEPTABILITY
will depend on the
ADEQUACY
of the theory in which they appear to yield
propositions which are directly matters
of general agreement. When an impasse ("aporia")
arises, the aim of the theorist will be
to ELIMINATE the impasse with minimal
disturbance to the material regarded as acceptable
BEFORE the impasse, including the
theoretical generalities of the theorist."
-----
Excursus on Baker's interpretation of 'amicus' = alter ego.
"... Baker mentions ... a certain kind of
criticism... by David Sachs." Changing the subject. Cfr. Quine, Duhem, Carnap.
----
Grice concludes the first section of his essay:
"The reflections in which I have just
been engaged, then, suggest to me
TWO FURTHER items which might
be added to a prospective subject matter
of philosophical eschatology."
---
"One would be a classification
of the various kinds of impasse or aproia
by theorists who engaged in the
Aristotelian undertaking of attempting
to systematise mterial with which they are
presented as LAY inquirers, together with
a classification of the variety of
responses which might be effective against
such impasses."
---
"The other would be a thoroughgoing
analysis of the boundary between
legitimate and ILLEGITIMATE imputations
to a theorist of the sin of 'having
changed the subject."
---- E.g. "I was talking legal 'right'; you are introducing MORAL right!"
----
Grice goes on:
"Beyond these additions I have at the moment
only one further suggetsion."
Grice's last suggestion:
"Sometimes, the activities of the eschatologist
might involve the suggestion of certain
PRINCIPLES
and some of the material embodied in
those principles might contain the potentialty of
independent life, a potentiality which it would
be theoretically advantageous to explore. This
further exploration might be regarded as
being itself
A PROPER OCCUPATION
for the eschatologist
[as opposed to the improper ones, alla pace Carnap!]."
"One example might be a further
examination of the theoretical
notion of [say] an alter ego..."
"Another example might be the
kind of abstract development of such
notions as
"MOVEMENT,"
that which moves, and what which is moved..."
-----
As from Section II, he proposes to analyse the tricky adjective 'right' in Neo-Socratic and neo-Thasymachean lines... (all quotations were as from WoW, pp. 304ff.)
Cheers.
This is a running commentary on Jones's recent post.
Jones writes:
"I think we have segued (not sure whether I like that word, but there it is) from vacuous names and truth value gaps at the Grice Club, via the notion of presupposition, with the assistance of Collingwood, into metaphysics here at The City of Eternal Truth. This I think, is a fine thing, and I thought I would just say why (I think its a fine thing) as a preliminary to milking it (at a leisurely pace). Why? Well, reflecting on the matter I concluded that "The City of Eternal Truth" should be, at its most profound, about metaphysics. The blog was invented by Speranza, though the phrase he took (of course) from Grice."
Indeed. Grice playfully quoting from "Pilgrim's Progress".
"And somehow this was supposed to involve Carnap as well. Speranza and I were at the time entering into collaboration on this essay called "a conversation between Carnap and Grice", which might possibly be about to move forward. This is how I now see it.
In the essay the idea was for Carnap and Grice to talk to each other and see whether their differences really were as great as they might at first sight appear.
First of all they have to try to understand each other so as to eliminate apparent, purely verbal, differences, and to work at the remaining apparently substantive disagreements to see whether a resolution of some kind might be possible.
So there is a bit of a focus on differences here. This gentle friction was to be a creative stimulus, a font of new ideas. The City of Eternal Truth is, as a Carnap/Grice enterprise, the other way up. It is a place where we focus on the fundamental issues on which Carnap and Grice might agree, a home for some of those new ideas. Apart from the Carnap/Grice angle, the idea of "Eternal Truth" does seem to push in the direction of metaphysics. It does seem to brush aside transient empirical accidents, including any features of language, natural or formal, which need not have been so. Of course, this still leaves natural laws, but they are for science, and that leaves us with metaphysics for the philosophers. But what hope would there be for a City built around a consensus between Carnap and Grice on metaphysics? At first glance there seems to be no common ground between them here.
I think however that a closer look might yield a more positive outlook, and that this might provide a nice way of moving forward for Speranza and I (Grice*! and Carnap*!, and anyone else interested) on both the "conversation" essay and the City blog. So here is my first take. We have to try to eliminate purely verbal disagreements, which are just obstacles, and then see whether, with some common terminology we can identify some common ground. Of course, we all know that Carnap completely and rather dogmatically rejected metaphysics in toto, whereas Grice was apparently much more liberal. Also we have Carnap quite keen on reductionist enterprises, which Grice calls minimalisms (or was it minimisms?)"
Minimalisms, I would think. "Minimism" is a minimal form of minimalism, if you mustn't. I think Grice refers to ONE Minimalism. I.e. all the -isms he cares to criticise (the 'betes noires' which Pilgrim Grice finds on his way to the City of the Eternal Truth) ARE variations on one single theme: the theme of minimalism.
----
"and thinks of perhaps as some grubby dogmatic empiricist nominalism. Grice on the other hand, is easy with metaphysics. We have him trying to understand Aristotle's metaphysics in a semi-formal way, and as an ordinary language philosopher he probably is OK with the enterprise which Strawson called "descriptive metaphysics" or even with Strawson's other kind (what was it?)."
I think he pretentiously called it 'revisionary'. Surely the antonym of 'descriptive' is _prescriptive_!
"To effect a reconciliation we have to work on both parties, in the first instance about language or terminology, for it seems to me that they really have quite different conceptions of what metaphysics is. There is also the difficulty about what "philosophy" is, but if we sideline value judgements about what philosophers ought to be doing, and bear in mind that Carnap at least was already, as he matured, softening some of his dogmas by refining his language (an example of which is to say "lacking in cognitive significance or content" instead of the bald and uncompromising "meaningless"). I'm going to pause there, to stop message bloat, and come back with some analysis of the different kinds of metaphysics at stake, before attempting to outline some ideas of metaphysics with which they might both be willing to move forward together (if they weren't dead!)."
Grice: "Try those who were great and dead as if they were great _AND LIVING_!" I know Jones did not mean any disrespect.
I love the idea of considering what we are talking about. Perhaps the blame is on Oxford. Back in the day, Collingwood, who wrote, "An essay in metaphysics", was appointed,
"Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy" (there are only three Oxford philo chairs: all oddly starting with "W", White chair of moral philosophy, Wykeham chair of logic, and Waynflete chair of metaphysical philosophy.
I like to think that what _Waynflete_ was up to was the distinction between:
physical philosophy -- YES, most things were deemed 'philosophy' back in the day.
metaphysical philosophy.
In more Romantic (as per Latin/Italian, and the Romance languages) parlance, the distinction between:
natural ------------ physical
trans-natural ------ meta-physical
(It is true that this is reading too much onto Aristotle, who just meant, 'those things which lie _next_ to the physics -- 'ta meta ta physika'.
But I do find the idea of 'trans-naturalia', sort of interesting, if mystic.
----
Now, when discussing about Collingwood's idea of the absolute presuppositions (and metaphysics as the science (or doctrine or discipline) of absolute presuppositions, it may do to revise the scholastic terminology:
There was metaphysica proper (transnaturalia). But there was 'ontologia', and this was considered to be divided into:
ontologia generalis
ontologia specialis----- within the specialis we basically get a "Theory of Everything":
------------ The two branches of 'ontologia specialis' being:
(in that order):
cosmologia
anthropologia
----
Now, for some quotations from Grice's "eschatology" essay in WoW, which Jones can also consult.
Grice is interested in EXTENDING the range of 'metaphysics' qua discipline. He writes:
"Some time ago"
---- this was written in 1987, but knowing Grice's preference for meiosis/litotes, this can well be, "circa 1946":
"the idea occurred to me"
as opposed to somebody else
"that there might be TWO DISTINGUISHABLE
DISCIPLINES each of which might have SOME
claim to the title or, or a share of the
title of, Metaphysics. The first of these
disciplines I thought of as being
CATEGORIAL in character"
-- and comprising Strawson's 'descriptive' and 'revisionary' varieties.
"that is to say, I thought of it as operating
at or BELOW the level of CATEGORIES."
Grice's keyword par excellence.
"Following leads suppplied primarily by
Aristotle and Kant,"
Or Ariskant, as he also called him.
"I conceived of it as concerned with
the identification of the most general
attributes or classifications, the SUMMA GENERA,
under which the various specific subject-items
and/or predicates (predicate-items, attributes)
might fall, and with the
formulation of metaphysical PRINCIPLES
governing such categorial attributes
(for examle some version of a Principle
of Causation, or some principle regulating
the persistence of substances)."
Recall that Collingwood thinks of the Principle of Causation as an 'absolute presupposition'.
Grice continues:
"The SECOND discipline I thought of as being
SUPRACATEGORIAL
in character; it would bring together
DIFFERENT subject-items BENEATH single
classificatory characterisations, and perhaps
would ALSO specificy PRINCIPLES which would have
to be exemplified by items brought together
by this kind of supracategorial assimilation."
Where 'assimilation' is the keyword. A metaphysical sentence belonging to this 'eschatological' branch would have complex truth-conditions, say.
Grice goes on:
"I hoped that the SECOND discipline, which I was tempted
to label"
and he did label
""Philosophical Eschatology"", might provide for
the detection of AFFINITIES between
CATEGORIALLY DIFFERENT REALITIES
--- thus, protecting the principles associated with
_particular_ categories from _suspiction of arbirariness_."
(or vacuity, pace Carnap?)
Grice continues:
"In response to a possibly objection to the
effect that
IF A PAIR OF ITEMS
were REALLY [trouser-word. Speranza]
categorially DIFFERENT
from one another, they could ****NOT****
[on risk of losing 'the bounds of sense', echoing Kant/Strawson]
BE ASSIMILATED
under a single classificatory head (since
they would be incapable of sharing
any attribute [[Jones may like to consider a set-theoretical reversion of this]),
I planned to reply that
EVEN
should it be _impossible_
for categorially different items
to _share_ a single attribute, this
objection might be INCONCLUSIVE
since 'assimilation' might take
the form of ascribing to the items
assimilated NOT A _COMMMON_ attribute
BUT an _ANALOGY_."
Keyword: Greek 'analogia'.
Grice continues:
"Traditionally, in such disciplines as
theology, analogy has been the resort of
those who hoped to find a way of comparing
entities so radically diverse from one
another as God and human beings."
Or cream-in-one's-coffee and personal objects of affection:
"You are like the cream in my coffee."
"You are the cream in my coffee." (discussion under 'metaphor' as conversational implicature, in WoW:ii).
Grice goes on:
"Such a mode of COMPARISON would
of course require careful examination."
Davidson, for example, thinks that
"The moon is made of cheese" is true iff the moon is made of cheese. The uttering of an analogy, a comparison, and a METAPHOR, involve supracategorial floutings to truth-conditional semantics: it's not the uttering of what is literally _false_ that matters.
Grice goes on:
"Such examination I shall for the moment defer,
as I shall also defer mention of certain further
ideas which I associated with philosophical
eschatology"
back in the day -- 'some time ago'.
Grice goes on:
"For a start, then, I might distinguish THREE
DIRECTIONS as being ones in which a philosophical
eschatologist [treading the path towards the City of Eternal Truth, as it were]
might be expected to deploy his energies."
FIRST:
"The provision of generalised
theoretical accounts which UNITE
specialised metaphysical [and why not 'physical' or
scientific? Speranza -- what is _metaphysical_
about the Principle of Causation? Speranza]
principles which are separated from another
by CATEGORY-BARRIERS."
Grice must be amusing himself with what was specially the obsession of another Waynflete professor of metaphysical philosophy: Gilbert Ryle ("Category mistakes", 'category-barriers' -- the 'mind' and the 'body' as the ultimate 'category mistakes' -- the ghost in the machine).
Grice goes on:
SECOND:
"Fulfilment of such an undertaking
might involve an adequate theoretical
characteristation of a relation of
AFFINITY,
which, like the more familiar
relation of SIMILARITY [if a is identical to a,
is a similar to a? Speranza] offers a foundation
for the generalisation of specialised
regularities, but which, unlike similarity,
is sensitive, or has a high degree of INSENSITIVITY,
to the presence of category-barriers."
Ryle's example: "Saturday is in bed with Monday."
----
Grice goes on: "To suggest the possibility of such a relation is NOT, of course, to CONSTRUCT it, nor even to provide a guarantee that it CAN be constructed."
THIRD:
"An investigation of the notion of
analogy,"
a/b = c/d
A C
---::---
B D
"You are like the cream in my coffee"
"and a delineation of its links
with other seemingly comparable
notions, such as METAPHOR, and PARABLE. Can this
list be expanded?"
Yes: disimplicature. "You're the cream in my coffee" Grice has, elsewhere, as the epitome of the disimplicature. So, even in the descriptive realm of metaphysics of the analysis of ordinary language use, one has to provide for the fact that utterers _disimplicate_ by what they say, never mind _mean_!
Grice:
"At his point I turn to a paper by
Judith Baker, entitled, "Another Self": Aristotle
on friendship."
Grice:
"On the present occasion, my concern is
focused on METHODOLOGICAL"
rather than substantive
"questions; so I propose first to consider
the ideas about METHODOLOGY, in particular
Aritotle's methodology, ... and then to
inquire whether these ideas suggest any
additions to the prospective subject matter
of philosophical eschatology. ... Baker
suggests that Aristotle's philosophical
method, .... treats the existence of a
common consensus of opinions with respect
to a proposition as conferring at least
provisional validity (validity ceteris paribus)
upon the proposition in question."
---- "Implicatures happen."
Grice goes on:
"In general, no external [Carnap's sense? I think so! Spernza] justification
of the acceptance of the objects of universal agreement is called for. This idea
has not always been accepted by philsoophers."
... excursus on Moore.
"If my perception of Moore is correct,
he would in Aristotle's view have been looking for
an EXTERNAL justification for the
acceptance of the deliverances of common sense where
none is required."
--- Ditto for "science"
Grice on
Eddington's table (cited elsewhere in The Grice Club) in "Actions and Events". Why accept the atomic table as the _real_ table?, and so on.
Grice goes on:
"Though no EXTERNAL justification is
required for accepting the validity
of propositions which are generally or
universally believed, the validity
in question is only provisional. For a
common consensus may be undermined
in either of two ways."
FIRST:
"There may be a common consensus that
proposition A is true, but there may be
two mutually inconsistent propositions,
B1 and B2, where while there is a common consensus
that either B1 or B2 is true, there is no common
consensus concerning the truth of B1 or the truth
of B2; there are, so to speak, two schools
of thought, one favouring B1 and one favouring
B2. Furthermore (we may suppose) the combination
of B1 with A will yield C1, whereas the combination
of B2 with A will yield C2; and C2 and C2 are
mutually inconsistent. In such a tiatuion it
becomes a question whether the acceptability
of A is LEFT INTACT. If it is, a method will
have to be devided for deciding between B1 and B2."
SECOND:
"To cope with problems created by the apperance
on the scene of conflicts or other stumbling blocks
the theorist may be expected to systematise
the data which are vouched for by
common consensus by himself devising general
propositions which are embedded in his theory. Such
generalities will NOT be directly attested
by the consensus, but their
ACCEPTABILITY
will depend on the
ADEQUACY
of the theory in which they appear to yield
propositions which are directly matters
of general agreement. When an impasse ("aporia")
arises, the aim of the theorist will be
to ELIMINATE the impasse with minimal
disturbance to the material regarded as acceptable
BEFORE the impasse, including the
theoretical generalities of the theorist."
-----
Excursus on Baker's interpretation of 'amicus' = alter ego.
"... Baker mentions ... a certain kind of
criticism... by David Sachs." Changing the subject. Cfr. Quine, Duhem, Carnap.
----
Grice concludes the first section of his essay:
"The reflections in which I have just
been engaged, then, suggest to me
TWO FURTHER items which might
be added to a prospective subject matter
of philosophical eschatology."
---
"One would be a classification
of the various kinds of impasse or aproia
by theorists who engaged in the
Aristotelian undertaking of attempting
to systematise mterial with which they are
presented as LAY inquirers, together with
a classification of the variety of
responses which might be effective against
such impasses."
---
"The other would be a thoroughgoing
analysis of the boundary between
legitimate and ILLEGITIMATE imputations
to a theorist of the sin of 'having
changed the subject."
---- E.g. "I was talking legal 'right'; you are introducing MORAL right!"
----
Grice goes on:
"Beyond these additions I have at the moment
only one further suggetsion."
Grice's last suggestion:
"Sometimes, the activities of the eschatologist
might involve the suggestion of certain
PRINCIPLES
and some of the material embodied in
those principles might contain the potentialty of
independent life, a potentiality which it would
be theoretically advantageous to explore. This
further exploration might be regarded as
being itself
A PROPER OCCUPATION
for the eschatologist
[as opposed to the improper ones, alla pace Carnap!]."
"One example might be a further
examination of the theoretical
notion of [say] an alter ego..."
"Another example might be the
kind of abstract development of such
notions as
"MOVEMENT,"
that which moves, and what which is moved..."
-----
As from Section II, he proposes to analyse the tricky adjective 'right' in Neo-Socratic and neo-Thasymachean lines... (all quotations were as from WoW, pp. 304ff.)
Cheers.
Presupposition and Metaphysics
Its a bit of a handicap having a lousy memory.
I see that in the draft "conversation" I had already casually made the connection (between presupposition and metaphysics) by describing (in section 4.5 "Metaphysics") descriptive metaphysics as concerned with metaphysics "as presupposed in ordinary language" (is this how Strawson describes it?).
So I already have a start, in 4.5, on a comparison of metaphysics in Grice and Carnap, but had not at that stage the opinion I am now moving towards on the importance of a conciliation on metaphysics for "The City".
However, I am inclined to start afresh on this, and first to post something on metaphysics on Carnap Corner.
RBJ
PS I just noticed that my last post on "one Bete too many" was very badly formatted so I went back and edited it to make it more readable.
I see that in the draft "conversation" I had already casually made the connection (between presupposition and metaphysics) by describing (in section 4.5 "Metaphysics") descriptive metaphysics as concerned with metaphysics "as presupposed in ordinary language" (is this how Strawson describes it?).
So I already have a start, in 4.5, on a comparison of metaphysics in Grice and Carnap, but had not at that stage the opinion I am now moving towards on the importance of a conciliation on metaphysics for "The City".
However, I am inclined to start afresh on this, and first to post something on metaphysics on Carnap Corner.
RBJ
PS I just noticed that my last post on "one Bete too many" was very badly formatted so I went back and edited it to make it more readable.
from language to metaphysics
I think we have segued (not sure whether I like that word, but there it is) from vacuous names and truth value gaps at the Grice Club, via the notion of presupposition, with the assistance of Collingwood, into metaphysics here at The City of Eternal Truth.
This I think, is a fine thing, and I thought I would just say why (I think its a fine thing) as a preliminary to milking it (at a leisurely pace).
Why?
Well, reflecting on the matter I concluded that "The City of Eternal Truth" should be, at its most profound, about metaphysics.
The blog was invented by Speranza, though the phrase he took (of course) from Grice. And somehow this was supposed to involve Carnap as well.
Speranza and I were at the time entering into collaboration on this essay called "a conversation between Carnap and Grice", which might possibly be about to move forward.
This is how I now see it.
In the essay the idea was for Carnap and Grice to talk to each other and see whether their differences really were as great as they might at first sight appear.
First of all they have to try to understand each other so as to eliminate apparent, purely verbal, differences, and to work at the remaining apparently substantive disagreements to see whether a resolution of some kind might be possible.
So there is a bit of a focus on differences here. This gentle friction was to be a creative stimulus, a font of new ideas.
The City of Eternal Truth is, as a Carnap/Grice enterprise, the other way up.
It is a place where we focus on the fundamental issues on which Carnap and Grice might agree, a home for some of those new ideas.
Apart from the Carnap/Grice angle, the idea of "Eternal Truth" does seem to push in the direction of metaphysics. It does seem to brush aside transient empirical accidents, including any features of language, natural or formal, which need not have been so.
Of course, this still leaves natural laws, but they are for science, and that leaves us with metaphysics for the philosophers.
But what hope would there be for a City built around a concensus between Carnap and Grice on metaphysics?
At first glance there seems to be no common ground between them here.
I think however that a closer look might yield a more positive outlook, and that this might provide a nice way of moving forward for Speranza and I (Grice*! and Carnap*!, and anyone else interested) on both the "conversation" essay and the City blog.
So here is my first take.
We have to try to eliminate purely verbal disagreements, which are just obstacles, and then see whether, with some common terminology we can identify some common ground.
Of course, we all know that Carnap completely and rather dogmatically rejected metaphysics in toto, whereas Grice was apparently much more liberal.
Also we have Carnap quite keen on reductionist enterprises, which Grice calls minimalisms (or was it minimisms?) and thinks of perhaps as some grubby dogmatic empiricist nominalism.
Grice on the other hand, is easy with metaphysics. We have him trying to understand Aristotle's metaphysics in a semi-formal way, and as an ordinary language philosopher he probably is OK with the enterprise which Strawson called "descriptive metaphysics" or even with Strawson's other kind (what was it?).
To effect a reconciliation we have to work on both parties, in the first instance about language or terminology, for it seems to me that they really have quite different conceptions of what metaphysics is.
There is also the difficulty about what "philosophy" is, but if we sideline value judgements about what philosophers ought to be doing, and bear in mind that Carnap at least was already, as he matured, softening some of his dogmas by refining his language (an example of which is to say "lacking in cognitive significance or content" instead of the bald and uncompromising "meaningless").
I'm going to pause there, to stop message bloat, and come back with some analysis of the different kinds of metaphysics at stake, before attempting to outline some ideas of metaphysics with which they might both be willing to move forward together (if they weren't dead!).
RBJ
This I think, is a fine thing, and I thought I would just say why (I think its a fine thing) as a preliminary to milking it (at a leisurely pace).
Why?
Well, reflecting on the matter I concluded that "The City of Eternal Truth" should be, at its most profound, about metaphysics.
The blog was invented by Speranza, though the phrase he took (of course) from Grice. And somehow this was supposed to involve Carnap as well.
Speranza and I were at the time entering into collaboration on this essay called "a conversation between Carnap and Grice", which might possibly be about to move forward.
This is how I now see it.
In the essay the idea was for Carnap and Grice to talk to each other and see whether their differences really were as great as they might at first sight appear.
First of all they have to try to understand each other so as to eliminate apparent, purely verbal, differences, and to work at the remaining apparently substantive disagreements to see whether a resolution of some kind might be possible.
So there is a bit of a focus on differences here. This gentle friction was to be a creative stimulus, a font of new ideas.
The City of Eternal Truth is, as a Carnap/Grice enterprise, the other way up.
It is a place where we focus on the fundamental issues on which Carnap and Grice might agree, a home for some of those new ideas.
Apart from the Carnap/Grice angle, the idea of "Eternal Truth" does seem to push in the direction of metaphysics. It does seem to brush aside transient empirical accidents, including any features of language, natural or formal, which need not have been so.
Of course, this still leaves natural laws, but they are for science, and that leaves us with metaphysics for the philosophers.
But what hope would there be for a City built around a concensus between Carnap and Grice on metaphysics?
At first glance there seems to be no common ground between them here.
I think however that a closer look might yield a more positive outlook, and that this might provide a nice way of moving forward for Speranza and I (Grice*! and Carnap*!, and anyone else interested) on both the "conversation" essay and the City blog.
So here is my first take.
We have to try to eliminate purely verbal disagreements, which are just obstacles, and then see whether, with some common terminology we can identify some common ground.
Of course, we all know that Carnap completely and rather dogmatically rejected metaphysics in toto, whereas Grice was apparently much more liberal.
Also we have Carnap quite keen on reductionist enterprises, which Grice calls minimalisms (or was it minimisms?) and thinks of perhaps as some grubby dogmatic empiricist nominalism.
Grice on the other hand, is easy with metaphysics. We have him trying to understand Aristotle's metaphysics in a semi-formal way, and as an ordinary language philosopher he probably is OK with the enterprise which Strawson called "descriptive metaphysics" or even with Strawson's other kind (what was it?).
To effect a reconciliation we have to work on both parties, in the first instance about language or terminology, for it seems to me that they really have quite different conceptions of what metaphysics is.
There is also the difficulty about what "philosophy" is, but if we sideline value judgements about what philosophers ought to be doing, and bear in mind that Carnap at least was already, as he matured, softening some of his dogmas by refining his language (an example of which is to say "lacking in cognitive significance or content" instead of the bald and uncompromising "meaningless").
I'm going to pause there, to stop message bloat, and come back with some analysis of the different kinds of metaphysics at stake, before attempting to outline some ideas of metaphysics with which they might both be willing to move forward together (if they weren't dead!).
RBJ
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Carnap, Kripke, presupposition
This is an expansion of a Carnap/Kripke angle on the connection between metaphysics and presupposition.
It is generally accepted that Kripke in some way conclusively showed that the notion of analyticity does not coincide with that of ("metaphysical") necessity, and hence put a few nails in the coffin of Carnap's philosophy.
There is in this no discussion of whether the concepts as understood by Kripke are the same concepts as those used by Carnap. It is just assumed that these concepts have a single definite meaning and that Kripke showed that the two differed in extension (and hence in meaning).
What seems not to be mentioned is that Carnap, far from carelessly identifying the two concepts actually defines necessity in terms of analyticity, and gives cogent reasons for doing so.
There is no carelessness here, and it is immediate that if Kripke's arguments are sound, then he must be using different concepts.
So where do tbe presuppositions come in?
Well first I have to give another account of how it is that necessity (metaphysical and logical) and analyticity coincide.
A sentence is analytic if its truth in every possible circumstance is a consequence of the semantics of the language. And if the language is for talking about the real world (rather than perhaps some abstract domain), then that means in every possible world (and hence we see immediately the connection with necessity).
But it is essential here that the semantics does provide a complete account of the truth conditions of the language.
In respect of an incomplete semantics then some sentences will not be analytic even though they may be true in every possible world.
Kripke introduces the notion of rigid designator.
These are supposed to designate the same entity in every possible world.
Consequently every true identity between rigid designators is necessary.
And it is held that these identities are not analytic (I have never actually seen an argument to that effect).
But this assumption is tantamount to the assumption that the semantics gives an incomplete account of the truth conditions for sentences in the language.
Even Quine, following his explanation of analyticity in "Two Dogmas" would have to agree that identities between rigid designators are analytic, for he allows that in judging analyticity we may use any information "about the language" but none about the world, and that two designators rigidly designate the same entitity is surely a fact about language not about this (or any other) world.
So here come the presuppositions (and the meaning postulates).
This tells you about how you have to go about formalising the semantics of language.
To give a complete account of the truth conditions of a sentence you must define a function whose domain is the possible worlds which yields the truth value of the sentence in each possible world.
This means that you have to define the set of possible worlds.
Carnap would not put it this way, but we could say that metaphysics is a stage in defining the semantics of a language.
For Carnap of course, defining this domain of possible worlds (states of affairs) is what his meaning postulates are for.
But we could also go with Collingwood, and talk of these constraints on the domain of the truth conditions as "absolute presuppositions" embedded in the language.
Personally, the introduction of meaning postulates by Carnap is not something I greatly care for, but I see that his decisions on what he called "language planning" and his semantic methods forced him into it, and to avoid them you need to start almost from scratch.
Meaning postulates were a sticking plaster made necessary by Carnap's failure to notice the flaw in Wittgenstein's account of logical truth in the Tractatus (which consists is asserting that atomic propositions are logically independent, as if there could be no logical relations between predicates).
Bear in mind here that neither Wittgenstein nor Carnap has a narrow conception of logical truth (as is standard now) both intending logical truth to exhaust the non-empirical and hence correspond with analyticity (suitably defined).
The connection between Carnapian necessities and presupposition would be too tenuous to be worthy of mention, were it not in the context of Collingwood, for in this context it makes a connection between Collingwood's conception of metaphysics and the concept of metaphysics Carnap might have had, if he had allowed himself a slightly more liberal use of the term.
(noting that nothing here disturbs the fact that Carnap has defined metaphysics out of existence, the meanings postulates, are not for him metaphysics, not even if they include large cardinal axioms to fix the meaning of the concept of set).
Roger Jones
It is generally accepted that Kripke in some way conclusively showed that the notion of analyticity does not coincide with that of ("metaphysical") necessity, and hence put a few nails in the coffin of Carnap's philosophy.
There is in this no discussion of whether the concepts as understood by Kripke are the same concepts as those used by Carnap. It is just assumed that these concepts have a single definite meaning and that Kripke showed that the two differed in extension (and hence in meaning).
What seems not to be mentioned is that Carnap, far from carelessly identifying the two concepts actually defines necessity in terms of analyticity, and gives cogent reasons for doing so.
There is no carelessness here, and it is immediate that if Kripke's arguments are sound, then he must be using different concepts.
So where do tbe presuppositions come in?
Well first I have to give another account of how it is that necessity (metaphysical and logical) and analyticity coincide.
A sentence is analytic if its truth in every possible circumstance is a consequence of the semantics of the language. And if the language is for talking about the real world (rather than perhaps some abstract domain), then that means in every possible world (and hence we see immediately the connection with necessity).
But it is essential here that the semantics does provide a complete account of the truth conditions of the language.
In respect of an incomplete semantics then some sentences will not be analytic even though they may be true in every possible world.
Kripke introduces the notion of rigid designator.
These are supposed to designate the same entity in every possible world.
Consequently every true identity between rigid designators is necessary.
And it is held that these identities are not analytic (I have never actually seen an argument to that effect).
But this assumption is tantamount to the assumption that the semantics gives an incomplete account of the truth conditions for sentences in the language.
Even Quine, following his explanation of analyticity in "Two Dogmas" would have to agree that identities between rigid designators are analytic, for he allows that in judging analyticity we may use any information "about the language" but none about the world, and that two designators rigidly designate the same entitity is surely a fact about language not about this (or any other) world.
So here come the presuppositions (and the meaning postulates).
This tells you about how you have to go about formalising the semantics of language.
To give a complete account of the truth conditions of a sentence you must define a function whose domain is the possible worlds which yields the truth value of the sentence in each possible world.
This means that you have to define the set of possible worlds.
Carnap would not put it this way, but we could say that metaphysics is a stage in defining the semantics of a language.
For Carnap of course, defining this domain of possible worlds (states of affairs) is what his meaning postulates are for.
But we could also go with Collingwood, and talk of these constraints on the domain of the truth conditions as "absolute presuppositions" embedded in the language.
Personally, the introduction of meaning postulates by Carnap is not something I greatly care for, but I see that his decisions on what he called "language planning" and his semantic methods forced him into it, and to avoid them you need to start almost from scratch.
Meaning postulates were a sticking plaster made necessary by Carnap's failure to notice the flaw in Wittgenstein's account of logical truth in the Tractatus (which consists is asserting that atomic propositions are logically independent, as if there could be no logical relations between predicates).
Bear in mind here that neither Wittgenstein nor Carnap has a narrow conception of logical truth (as is standard now) both intending logical truth to exhaust the non-empirical and hence correspond with analyticity (suitably defined).
The connection between Carnapian necessities and presupposition would be too tenuous to be worthy of mention, were it not in the context of Collingwood, for in this context it makes a connection between Collingwood's conception of metaphysics and the concept of metaphysics Carnap might have had, if he had allowed himself a slightly more liberal use of the term.
(noting that nothing here disturbs the fact that Carnap has defined metaphysics out of existence, the meanings postulates, are not for him metaphysics, not even if they include large cardinal axioms to fix the meaning of the concept of set).
Roger Jones
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