Carnap and Grice on presupposition

Speranza

This is, of course, about Collingwood's presupposition. Via wiki,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Pierce/An_Essay_on_Metaphysics_(R._G._Collingwood)

It may interest Jones.

Chapter IV of Collingwood's "Essay in metaphysics" is entitled, "On Presupposing".

There are statements, questions, and suppositions.

That which is stated is something that can be true or false.

Following a convention that he does not like, Collingwood will call this a proposition, and stating it is propounding it.

It is not clear that Collingwood makes an important distinction between a statement and a proposition.

Neither does he say explicitly that they are the same thing.

Every statement is the answer to a question.

This question is always logically prior to the statement.

In scientific thinking, the question is also temporally prior, although it persists while it is being answered.

For example, an everyday observation like

"That is a clothes-line"

is preceded logically, but perhaps not in time, by a question like

"What is that line for?"

Every question has a presupposition, which is logically prior to the question.

The question "What is that line for?" has the presupposition that the line is for something.

When a question has an unmade presupposition, it is said that the question does not arise.

For example, the question

"When did you stop beating your spouse?"

usually does not arise.

[I discussed this elsewhere. Grice refers to the wife in WoW:Presupp. and Conv. Impl, and most notably in that section that Neale was complaining Grice did not reprint in WoW, in "Causal theory of perception". Grice uses,

"When did you stop beating your wife?"

along with "My wife is in the kitchen or the bathroom", and "He has beautiful handwriting" and "She was poor but she was honest" as the FOUR examples. This one is of 'presupposition'. I discussed this elsewhere, "Tu non cessas comedere ferrum", You do not cease to eat iron, an old sophisma.

That a supposition causes a question to arise is the logical efficacy of the supposition.

The supposition need not be a proposition in order to have logical efficacy.

For example, in commerce, the supposition that people are dishonest causes receipts to be requested.

But a request for a receipt is not an accusation that somebody is in fact dishonest.

Assumptions are suppositions made by choice.

Not all suppositions are assumptions.

It can be rude to accuse people of making wrong assumptions when they are only making suppositions.

Presuppositions that are themselves answers to questions are relative presuppositions.

There are also absolute presuppositions, which are not answers to any questions.

--- These should interst us as we walk towards the city of eternal truth. Or not!

They are not propositions.

They are neither true or false.

For example, the pathologist works with the absolute presupposition that every disease has a cause.

This is not something that can be discovered or verified, like the existence of microbes.

It is taken for granted.

The metaphysician's job is not to propound this or that absolute presupposition, because it cannot be done.

The metaphysician's job is to propound the proposition that this or that supposition is an absolute presupposition.

The next Chapter, V, Collingwood entitles, "[Metaphysics as] The Science of Absolute Presuppositions".

Thinking comes in grades.

In low-grade, unscientific thinking, we do not recognize that every thought answers a question, much less that every question has a presupposition.

Low-grade thinking cannot give rise to metaphysics.

It does give rise to the "realist" theory whereby knowledge is "intuition" or "apprehension" of what confronts us.

The harm of Realism comes from thinking that it is re-doing, only better, what people like Descartes and Kant have done.

As higher animals can use energy in bursts to overcome obstacles, so humans can use high-grade, scientific thinking to transform their world.

High-grade thinking depends on:

1. Increased mental effort, with which comes the asking of questions.

2. Skill in directing this effort:

Questions that may be grammatically one, although they are logically many, must be
disentangled and resolved into their components; arranged so that a question whose answer is presupposed by another question precedes that question.

This work of disentangling and arranging is analysis.

It is the work of detecting presuppositions.

Detecting absolute presuppositions is metaphysical analysis.

But all analysis raises the question of whether a given presupposition is relative or absolute.

Thus metaphysics is born together with science. (Surely Collingwood was well read in Carnap -- and Grice was _hearing_ all this).

As invented by Aristotle, metaphysics (after the nonsense of ontology is removed) is the science of absolute presuppositions.

This will be shown by the examples in Part III. Meanwhile, we are working what this formulation of metaphysics means.

Telling whether a presupposition is relative or absolute:

--- can be difficult, since acknowledging the existence of absolute presuppositions is out of fashion in modern Europe;

--- cannot be done by introspection, since this only focusses on what we are already aware of, and in low-grade thinking, we are not even aware of the questions that our propositions answer;

requires analysis.

This analysis can be done with a willing subject trained in some scientific work, but unused to metaphysics.

He will be "ticklish" about his absolute presuppositions, but not the relative.

He will accept an invitation to try to justify the latter, but not the former. However, the subject will lose value as he gains experience.

It is better to experiment on oneself.

Ordinary science identifies relative presuppositions for future study.

Metaphysics, absolute presuppositions.

Absolute presuppositions can cause "numinous terror" (in the terminology of Rudolf Otto).

In the past, people had "magical" ways to deal with this terror.

Now we have abolished magic, so we frown on metaphysics, denying the existence of absolute presuppositions.

This is neurosis. Successful eradication of metaphysics will eradicate science and civilisation.

Pseudo-metaphysics asks whether a given absolute presupposition is true, and why.

Answers to such questions are nonsense.

[True pure Carnap].

Grice saw this.