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.