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