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.