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.