Speranza
Smullyan shared some passions with Carnap and Grice, if you can believe it.
Smullyan, the author of a very influential, "First-Order Logic" believed, well, in the power of first-order logic.
His education was peripatetic. An MA followed by a PhD from Princeton on "Theory of Formal Systems."
His main contribution was puzzling: it was his puzzles.
He was an admirer of Goedel, and his list of favourite authors should please both a Carnapian and a Griceian: Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), Boole, Cantor, and a few others!
And he had a sense of humour.
When Grice left Oxford, he had to give some reason. He said he moved because he was looking for the assistance of logicians and he couldn't find ONE in Oxford!
This was a bit hyperbolic. He, for one, was one (Strawson credits him in "Introduction to Logical Theory" as the tutor "from whom I have never ceased to learn about logic"). In "Vacuous Names," Grice's convoluted exposition of a System to allow for names like "Marmaduke Bloggs," who refers the hero who climbed Mt. Everest on hands and knees ("the invention of journalists, as it happened," Grice adds), there is a passing reference to Smullyan. With Myro, and others, Smullyan provided Grice with a way to provide a neat exposition of first order predicate logic -- of which Smullyan was an expert.
The fact that both played the piano helped!
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Saturday, February 11, 2017
Reason and Reasoning -- and Grice's Bootstrap
-- as it combines with Carnapian tolerance!
Speranza
R. B. Jones has shared with us (that's R. B. Jones and Speranza -- and all the other followers of the yellow brick road to the City of the Eternal Truth) some comments under "Deep Learning Eternal Truth".
Jones notes:
"I thought it might be of some interest to the followers of this blog (both of them) for me to say a few words connecting my present pre-occupations with the Carnap-flavour of the City of Eternal Truth, and this is it."
Good. I love 'pre-occupations'. They contrast of course, Carnapian pre-occupations, with Griceian post-occupations. Which reminds me of the Roman occupation, as satirised by Sellars and Yeatman in "1066 and all that" -- nice figure!
Jones goes on
"I spent a while a few years ago failing to complete a short book-shaped work entitled "Positive Philosophy and The Automation of Reason". "
Lovely title. Jones of course is aware of Comte's positivism, and the new logical positivism. He prefers the mere 'positive', as applied to 'philosophy'. "The automation of reason" is a genial turn of phrase.
Jones:
"It ran into the sand in a very incomplete state at about 130 pages, and though I still felt positive about the enterprise I couldn't find the way to make it move again."
The keyword, though, remains, 'automation of reason', and we should use that phrase more frequently!
Jones:
"Of course (!) "reason" is the key weapon we have in the search for eternal truth."
While Grice uses 'eternal' truth -- as applied to the city thereof -- the phrase also occurs in Quine. I think it's ultimately 'metaphorical', "eternal" -- Grice's 'timeless' won't do here either.
i. Either it will rain or it won't.
is possibly NOT a 'so-called' "eternal" truth, in that in trivalent logics, is not even tautologous!
Jones:
"For a man of logical bent, surely the truths which most deserve that plaudit are the logical truths (though what are they?)."
Indeed, if 'rational' and 'logical' are interchangeable, there's also the possibility to play with 'analytic a priori' truths, as Ayer (or Freddie to his friends) calls them in his Gollancz book -- a classic of logical positivism. Ayer however notes that 'a priori' is otiose, and 'analytic truth' will just do.
Jones:
"Notwithstanding the foundering of that project, it remains my life's pre-occupation to find some way of progressing that topic, or simply of articulating the ideas on it which jostle for attention in my head. A few months ago I made a fresh start at that, shifting the context in which to progress the ideas. The whole thing has always been for me a fence-sitting between the fields of philosophy and information systems engineering."
Beautiful. But cfr. Cole Porter, "Don't fence me in"!
Jones:
"To automate reason is to develop software, and maybe, as is happening right now, to re-architect the hardware we use to execute the software (new hardware architectures for "Deep Learning", beyond Von Neumann). "
Hence the title of his post, with "deep learning" as yet another keyword.
Jones:
"An architecture for reason and its application, depends on philosophical foundations. The articulation of appropriate such foundations is an essential and should be a prominent feature of any such architecture. "
Hence the first part of his conjunctive title, "Positive philosophy AND the automation of reason". The implicature being that only positive philosophy can provide such a foundation. This reminds me of Husserl who said that he dreamed of a philosophy without foundations!
Jones:
"On the other hand, even if the primary purpose is philosophical, the architectural application is a valuable way of testing the practical significance of various issues at stake. One problem with a purely philosophical approach is the enormous difficulty in swimming against the tide of contemporary philosophical opinion, which in this sphere is unduly negative about the status of formal deductive systems as a result, for example, of the Godel's incompleteness results, and of Quine's skepticism about semantics and his consequent dismissal of the notion of logical truth as it was conceived by Carnap (aka analytic truth)."
Indeed, not to mention ("then why do you?") Derrida and all the irrationalists. There is some remarks by Grice on the analytic-synthetic distinction on his Valediction (to his life, almost), in "Retrospective Epilogue" to WoW. He notes that one should indeed take a pragmatist approach to the notion of analyticity.
Jones:
"A shift of thinking from a philosophical perspective on this problem to an architectural engineering perspective is liberating in a way which Carnap's principle of tolerance would endorse.
It allows the adoption of philosophical terminology, in the service of architectural exposition, on a pragmatic basis, sidestepping side issues which in this context may be regarded as metaphysical."
Indeed. Which brings us back to Grice's Bootstrap ("Try to pull yourself by your own bootstraps"). He is (in "Reply to Richards") considering
L1
and
L2
or object-language and meta-language. And he is saying that if L1 is first-order predicate calculus, L2 should NOT contain too much metaphysical jargon; for the idea is that L2 should be reduced to L1, as far as terminology is concerned. So the less technical one is with one's L2, the fewer problems with the morrow, he hopes.
Jones:
"This is what I have done to progress the body of ideas with which I approach the "City of Eternal Truth". I have moved the locus of my creativity from my web domain, hosting philosophical web pages and abortive book projects, to my github account (see: rbjones.github.io),"
which EVERYBODY should check -- where 'everybody' is a universal non-substitutional quantifier, if you must!
Jones:
"where I now seek to articulate a 21st century successor to the idea of demonstrative science found in Aristotle's "Organon," taking science here just as broadly as Aristotle did, encompassing theoretical, practical and productive sciences, and the role which deduction and logical truth plays in this broad arena."
Good. I like the idea of 'demonstrative' science alla Kantotle. Grice used to lecture on the Organon, if you can believe it! And, to me, the most important thing of his seminars on Aristotle's Organon at Oxford is that J. L. Ackrill attended them! (And credits Grice as having taught him Aristotle "so well" -- In Oxford, Plato is almost non-existant, unless you are Hegelian or Bradleyian).
Jones:
"Of course, putting the material at Github creates an expectation that these architectural philosophies will ultimately be translated into code. It's a dream..."
worth pursuing.
"Code" is perhaps not a Griceian word. There is usually the distinction between a code-based model of communication and an inference-based model of communication. The idea is that codes tend to be otiose if we can provide a 'rationale' in terms of inference patterns for them.
Grice said, "Do not multiply senses beyond necessity", and I don't think there is a necessity to multiply the senses of 'code', which is UNI-guous, or monosemous. But Jones uses it alla Jones, and I use it alla Grice.
The code relates to the automation of reason, that Hobbes would have loved!
Cheers
Speranza
R. B. Jones has shared with us (that's R. B. Jones and Speranza -- and all the other followers of the yellow brick road to the City of the Eternal Truth) some comments under "Deep Learning Eternal Truth".
Jones notes:
"I thought it might be of some interest to the followers of this blog (both of them) for me to say a few words connecting my present pre-occupations with the Carnap-flavour of the City of Eternal Truth, and this is it."
Good. I love 'pre-occupations'. They contrast of course, Carnapian pre-occupations, with Griceian post-occupations. Which reminds me of the Roman occupation, as satirised by Sellars and Yeatman in "1066 and all that" -- nice figure!
Jones goes on
"I spent a while a few years ago failing to complete a short book-shaped work entitled "Positive Philosophy and The Automation of Reason". "
Lovely title. Jones of course is aware of Comte's positivism, and the new logical positivism. He prefers the mere 'positive', as applied to 'philosophy'. "The automation of reason" is a genial turn of phrase.
Jones:
"It ran into the sand in a very incomplete state at about 130 pages, and though I still felt positive about the enterprise I couldn't find the way to make it move again."
The keyword, though, remains, 'automation of reason', and we should use that phrase more frequently!
Jones:
"Of course (!) "reason" is the key weapon we have in the search for eternal truth."
While Grice uses 'eternal' truth -- as applied to the city thereof -- the phrase also occurs in Quine. I think it's ultimately 'metaphorical', "eternal" -- Grice's 'timeless' won't do here either.
i. Either it will rain or it won't.
is possibly NOT a 'so-called' "eternal" truth, in that in trivalent logics, is not even tautologous!
Jones:
"For a man of logical bent, surely the truths which most deserve that plaudit are the logical truths (though what are they?)."
Indeed, if 'rational' and 'logical' are interchangeable, there's also the possibility to play with 'analytic a priori' truths, as Ayer (or Freddie to his friends) calls them in his Gollancz book -- a classic of logical positivism. Ayer however notes that 'a priori' is otiose, and 'analytic truth' will just do.
Jones:
"Notwithstanding the foundering of that project, it remains my life's pre-occupation to find some way of progressing that topic, or simply of articulating the ideas on it which jostle for attention in my head. A few months ago I made a fresh start at that, shifting the context in which to progress the ideas. The whole thing has always been for me a fence-sitting between the fields of philosophy and information systems engineering."
Beautiful. But cfr. Cole Porter, "Don't fence me in"!
Jones:
"To automate reason is to develop software, and maybe, as is happening right now, to re-architect the hardware we use to execute the software (new hardware architectures for "Deep Learning", beyond Von Neumann). "
Hence the title of his post, with "deep learning" as yet another keyword.
Jones:
"An architecture for reason and its application, depends on philosophical foundations. The articulation of appropriate such foundations is an essential and should be a prominent feature of any such architecture. "
Hence the first part of his conjunctive title, "Positive philosophy AND the automation of reason". The implicature being that only positive philosophy can provide such a foundation. This reminds me of Husserl who said that he dreamed of a philosophy without foundations!
Jones:
"On the other hand, even if the primary purpose is philosophical, the architectural application is a valuable way of testing the practical significance of various issues at stake. One problem with a purely philosophical approach is the enormous difficulty in swimming against the tide of contemporary philosophical opinion, which in this sphere is unduly negative about the status of formal deductive systems as a result, for example, of the Godel's incompleteness results, and of Quine's skepticism about semantics and his consequent dismissal of the notion of logical truth as it was conceived by Carnap (aka analytic truth)."
Indeed, not to mention ("then why do you?") Derrida and all the irrationalists. There is some remarks by Grice on the analytic-synthetic distinction on his Valediction (to his life, almost), in "Retrospective Epilogue" to WoW. He notes that one should indeed take a pragmatist approach to the notion of analyticity.
Jones:
"A shift of thinking from a philosophical perspective on this problem to an architectural engineering perspective is liberating in a way which Carnap's principle of tolerance would endorse.
It allows the adoption of philosophical terminology, in the service of architectural exposition, on a pragmatic basis, sidestepping side issues which in this context may be regarded as metaphysical."
Indeed. Which brings us back to Grice's Bootstrap ("Try to pull yourself by your own bootstraps"). He is (in "Reply to Richards") considering
L1
and
L2
or object-language and meta-language. And he is saying that if L1 is first-order predicate calculus, L2 should NOT contain too much metaphysical jargon; for the idea is that L2 should be reduced to L1, as far as terminology is concerned. So the less technical one is with one's L2, the fewer problems with the morrow, he hopes.
Jones:
"This is what I have done to progress the body of ideas with which I approach the "City of Eternal Truth". I have moved the locus of my creativity from my web domain, hosting philosophical web pages and abortive book projects, to my github account (see: rbjones.github.io),"
which EVERYBODY should check -- where 'everybody' is a universal non-substitutional quantifier, if you must!
Jones:
"where I now seek to articulate a 21st century successor to the idea of demonstrative science found in Aristotle's "Organon," taking science here just as broadly as Aristotle did, encompassing theoretical, practical and productive sciences, and the role which deduction and logical truth plays in this broad arena."
Good. I like the idea of 'demonstrative' science alla Kantotle. Grice used to lecture on the Organon, if you can believe it! And, to me, the most important thing of his seminars on Aristotle's Organon at Oxford is that J. L. Ackrill attended them! (And credits Grice as having taught him Aristotle "so well" -- In Oxford, Plato is almost non-existant, unless you are Hegelian or Bradleyian).
Jones:
"Of course, putting the material at Github creates an expectation that these architectural philosophies will ultimately be translated into code. It's a dream..."
worth pursuing.
"Code" is perhaps not a Griceian word. There is usually the distinction between a code-based model of communication and an inference-based model of communication. The idea is that codes tend to be otiose if we can provide a 'rationale' in terms of inference patterns for them.
Grice said, "Do not multiply senses beyond necessity", and I don't think there is a necessity to multiply the senses of 'code', which is UNI-guous, or monosemous. But Jones uses it alla Jones, and I use it alla Grice.
The code relates to the automation of reason, that Hobbes would have loved!
Cheers
Aspects of reason and reasoning
Speranza
In his interesting "Deep Learning Eternal Truth," R. B. Jones "thought" (and rightly so) that "it might be of some interest to the followers of this blog (both of them) for me to say a few words connecting my present pre-occupations with the Carnap-flavour of the City of Eternal Truth, and this is it."
Of course there may be more than two (one of which is him) who read this if not follow the yellow brick road (to the City of course!)
"I spent a while a few years ago failing to complete a short book-shaped work entitled "Positive Philosophy and The Automation of Reason". It ran into the sand in a very incomplete state at about 130 pages, and though I still felt positive about the enterprise I couldn't find the way to make it move again."
Blame the sand -- but I love the phrase, 'automation of reason', which of course reminds me of Grice's John Locke Lectures on Aspects of reason and reasoning (previously given as the Immanuel Kant lectures, under the same title, at Stanford -- trust Grice to turn from rationalist to empiricist as he crossed the pond!)
"Of course (!) "reason" is the key weapon we have in the search for eternal truth. For a man of logical bent, surely the truths which most deserve that plaudit are the logical truths (though what are they?)."
Well, for Cicero, 'ratio' was a problem. The Grecian (as in "Ode on a Grecian urn") keyword is merely "logic".
Jones:
"Notwithstanding the foundering of that project, it remains my life's pre-occupation to find some way of progressing that topic, or simply of articulating the ideas on it which jostle for attention in my head. A few months ago I made a fresh start at that, shifting the context in which to progress the ideas. The whole thing has always been for me a fence-sitting between the fields of philosophy and information systems engineering. To automate reason is to develop software, and maybe, as is happening right now, to re-architect the hardware we use to execute the software (new hardware architectures for "Deep Learning", beyond Von Neumann). An architecture for reason and its application, depends on philosophical foundations. The articulation of appropriate such foundations is an essential and should be a prominent feature of any such architecture. On the other hand, even if the primary purpose is philosophical,"
Grice and Carnap would be delighted to hear that!
"the architectural application is a valuable way of testing the practical significance of various issues at stake."
Jones:
"One problem with a purely philosophical approach is the enormous difficulty in swimming against the tide of contemporary philosophical opinion, which in this sphere is unduly negative about the status of formal deductive systems as a result, for example, of the Godel's incompleteness results, and of Quine's skepticism about semantics and his consequent dismissal of the notion of logical truth as it was conceived by Carnap (aka analytic truth)."
Not to mention ("when why do you?", I can imagine Jones retorting) Derrida and all the continental irrationalists!
Jones:
"A shift of thinking from a philosophical perspctive on this problem to an architectural engineering perspective is liberating in a way which Carnap's principle of tolerance would endorse.
It allows the adoption of philosophical terminology, in the service of architectural exposition, on a pragmatic basis, sidestepping side issues which in this context may be regarded as metaphysical. This is what I have done to progress the body of ideas with which I approach the "City of Eternal Truth".
This reminds me of Grice's bootstrap principle ("try to pull yourself by your own bootstraps", in "Reply to Richards"): the less metaphysical the metalanguage, the less problems for the morrow!
Jones:
"I have moved the locus of my creativity from my web domain, hosting philosophical web pages and abortive book projects, to my github account (see: rbjones.github.io),"
which everybody should check, not just two followers!
"where I now seek to articulate a 21st century successor to the idea of demonstrative science found in Aristotle's Organon, taking science here just as broadly as Aristotle did, encompassing theoretical, practical and productive sciences, and the role which deduction and logical truth plays in this broad arena. Of course, putting the material at Github creates an expectation that these architectural philosophies will ultimately be translated into code. It's a dream" but one worth pursuing.
That's the stuff that dreams are made of, as the refrain to that catchy song goes!
In his interesting "Deep Learning Eternal Truth," R. B. Jones "thought" (and rightly so) that "it might be of some interest to the followers of this blog (both of them) for me to say a few words connecting my present pre-occupations with the Carnap-flavour of the City of Eternal Truth, and this is it."
Of course there may be more than two (one of which is him) who read this if not follow the yellow brick road (to the City of course!)
"I spent a while a few years ago failing to complete a short book-shaped work entitled "Positive Philosophy and The Automation of Reason". It ran into the sand in a very incomplete state at about 130 pages, and though I still felt positive about the enterprise I couldn't find the way to make it move again."
Blame the sand -- but I love the phrase, 'automation of reason', which of course reminds me of Grice's John Locke Lectures on Aspects of reason and reasoning (previously given as the Immanuel Kant lectures, under the same title, at Stanford -- trust Grice to turn from rationalist to empiricist as he crossed the pond!)
"Of course (!) "reason" is the key weapon we have in the search for eternal truth. For a man of logical bent, surely the truths which most deserve that plaudit are the logical truths (though what are they?)."
Well, for Cicero, 'ratio' was a problem. The Grecian (as in "Ode on a Grecian urn") keyword is merely "logic".
Jones:
"Notwithstanding the foundering of that project, it remains my life's pre-occupation to find some way of progressing that topic, or simply of articulating the ideas on it which jostle for attention in my head. A few months ago I made a fresh start at that, shifting the context in which to progress the ideas. The whole thing has always been for me a fence-sitting between the fields of philosophy and information systems engineering. To automate reason is to develop software, and maybe, as is happening right now, to re-architect the hardware we use to execute the software (new hardware architectures for "Deep Learning", beyond Von Neumann). An architecture for reason and its application, depends on philosophical foundations. The articulation of appropriate such foundations is an essential and should be a prominent feature of any such architecture. On the other hand, even if the primary purpose is philosophical,"
Grice and Carnap would be delighted to hear that!
"the architectural application is a valuable way of testing the practical significance of various issues at stake."
Jones:
"One problem with a purely philosophical approach is the enormous difficulty in swimming against the tide of contemporary philosophical opinion, which in this sphere is unduly negative about the status of formal deductive systems as a result, for example, of the Godel's incompleteness results, and of Quine's skepticism about semantics and his consequent dismissal of the notion of logical truth as it was conceived by Carnap (aka analytic truth)."
Not to mention ("when why do you?", I can imagine Jones retorting) Derrida and all the continental irrationalists!
Jones:
"A shift of thinking from a philosophical perspctive on this problem to an architectural engineering perspective is liberating in a way which Carnap's principle of tolerance would endorse.
It allows the adoption of philosophical terminology, in the service of architectural exposition, on a pragmatic basis, sidestepping side issues which in this context may be regarded as metaphysical. This is what I have done to progress the body of ideas with which I approach the "City of Eternal Truth".
This reminds me of Grice's bootstrap principle ("try to pull yourself by your own bootstraps", in "Reply to Richards"): the less metaphysical the metalanguage, the less problems for the morrow!
Jones:
"I have moved the locus of my creativity from my web domain, hosting philosophical web pages and abortive book projects, to my github account (see: rbjones.github.io),"
which everybody should check, not just two followers!
"where I now seek to articulate a 21st century successor to the idea of demonstrative science found in Aristotle's Organon, taking science here just as broadly as Aristotle did, encompassing theoretical, practical and productive sciences, and the role which deduction and logical truth plays in this broad arena. Of course, putting the material at Github creates an expectation that these architectural philosophies will ultimately be translated into code. It's a dream" but one worth pursuing.
That's the stuff that dreams are made of, as the refrain to that catchy song goes!
Deep Learning Eternal Truth
I thought it might be of some interest to the followers of this blog (both of them) for me to say a few words connecting my present pre-occupations with the Carnap-flavour of the City of Eternal Truth, and this is it.
I spent a while a few years ago failing to complete a short book-shaped work entitled "Positive Philosophy and The Automation of Reason". It ran into the sand in a very incomplete state at about 130 pages, and though I still felt positive about the enterprise I couldn't find the way to make it move again.
Of course (!) "reason" is the key weapon we have in the search for eternal truth. For a man of logical bent, surely the truths which most deserve that plaudit are the logical truths (though what are they?).
Notwithstanding the foundering of that project, it remains my life's pre-occupation to find some way of progressing that topic, or simply of articulating the ideas on it which jostle for attention in my head.
A few months ago I made a fresh start at that, shifting the context in which to progress the ideas.
The whole thing has always been for me a fence-sitting between the fields of philosophy and information systems engineering. To automate reason is to develop software, and maybe, as is happening right now, to re-architect the hardware we use to execute the software (new hardware architectures for "Deep Learning", beyond Von Neumann). An architecture for reason and its application, depends on philosophical foundations. The articulation of appropriate such foundations is an essential and should be a prominent feature of any such architecture. On the other hand, even if the primary purpose is philosophical, the architectural application is a valuable way of testing the practical significance of various issues at stake.
One problem with a purely philosophical approach is the enormous difficulty in swimming against the tide of contemporary philosophical opinion, which in this sphere is unduly negative about the status of formal deductive systems as a result, for example, of the Godel's incompleteness results, and of Quine's skepticism about semantics and his consequent dismissal of the notion of logical truth as it was conceived by Carnap (aka analytic truth).
A shift of thinking from a philosophical perspctive on this problem to an architectural engineering perspective is liberating in a way which Carnap's principle of tolerance would endorse.
It allows the adoption of philosophical terminology, in the service of architectural exposition, on a pragmatic basis, sidestepping side issues which in this context may be regarded as metaphysical.
This is what I have done to progress the body of ideas with which I approach the "City of Eternal Truth".
I have moved the locus of my creativity from my web domain, hosting philosophical web pages and abortive book projects, to my github account (see: rbjones.github.io), where I now seek to articulate a 21st century successor to the idea of demonstrative science found in Aristotle's Organon, taking science here just as broadly as Aristotle did, encompassing theoretical, practical and productive sciences, and the role which deduction and logical truth plays in this broad arena.
Of course, putting the material at Github creates an expectation that these architectural philosophies will ultimately be translated into code. Its a dream,
I spent a while a few years ago failing to complete a short book-shaped work entitled "Positive Philosophy and The Automation of Reason". It ran into the sand in a very incomplete state at about 130 pages, and though I still felt positive about the enterprise I couldn't find the way to make it move again.
Of course (!) "reason" is the key weapon we have in the search for eternal truth. For a man of logical bent, surely the truths which most deserve that plaudit are the logical truths (though what are they?).
Notwithstanding the foundering of that project, it remains my life's pre-occupation to find some way of progressing that topic, or simply of articulating the ideas on it which jostle for attention in my head.
A few months ago I made a fresh start at that, shifting the context in which to progress the ideas.
The whole thing has always been for me a fence-sitting between the fields of philosophy and information systems engineering. To automate reason is to develop software, and maybe, as is happening right now, to re-architect the hardware we use to execute the software (new hardware architectures for "Deep Learning", beyond Von Neumann). An architecture for reason and its application, depends on philosophical foundations. The articulation of appropriate such foundations is an essential and should be a prominent feature of any such architecture. On the other hand, even if the primary purpose is philosophical, the architectural application is a valuable way of testing the practical significance of various issues at stake.
One problem with a purely philosophical approach is the enormous difficulty in swimming against the tide of contemporary philosophical opinion, which in this sphere is unduly negative about the status of formal deductive systems as a result, for example, of the Godel's incompleteness results, and of Quine's skepticism about semantics and his consequent dismissal of the notion of logical truth as it was conceived by Carnap (aka analytic truth).
A shift of thinking from a philosophical perspctive on this problem to an architectural engineering perspective is liberating in a way which Carnap's principle of tolerance would endorse.
It allows the adoption of philosophical terminology, in the service of architectural exposition, on a pragmatic basis, sidestepping side issues which in this context may be regarded as metaphysical.
This is what I have done to progress the body of ideas with which I approach the "City of Eternal Truth".
I have moved the locus of my creativity from my web domain, hosting philosophical web pages and abortive book projects, to my github account (see: rbjones.github.io), where I now seek to articulate a 21st century successor to the idea of demonstrative science found in Aristotle's Organon, taking science here just as broadly as Aristotle did, encompassing theoretical, practical and productive sciences, and the role which deduction and logical truth plays in this broad arena.
Of course, putting the material at Github creates an expectation that these architectural philosophies will ultimately be translated into code. Its a dream,
Thursday, February 9, 2017
Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Paul Grice, and Marcus William Dick
Speranza
There was a post in the Grice Club which was basically a quotation from P. M. S. Hacker's essay on Witters (or Wittgenstein, if you must). Hacker has a thing, like I do, matter of fact, for alphabetical ordering. And he manages to try to list the members of what J. L. Austin called his 'kindergarten' -- i.e. the members of that play group that he led and that met on Saturday mornings. The list starts -- I shall use set-theoretical formulation to please Jones:
PG = {Dick, Grice, ...}
i.e. Dick is the first in the list, followed by Grice. I don't think Hacker is trying anything too deep, since, give me five minutes or so, and I shall find members for the play group starting with A, B, and C -- so Dick would NOT be the first!
In any case, why does this relate to The Eternal Truth?
Well, in "Dear Carnap, Dear Van: The Quine-Carnap Correspondence and Related Work," edited by Richard Creath, we read:
"Among it various communications from Marcus Dick, trying to get in touch with us."
So, yes, Dick made it to the Carnap annals, too! The interesting thing is that the communications could not be reciprocated because Marcus Dick left no 'future address', if you can believe that!
Ah, well.
In his biography, Quine notes that Dick had been a Commonwealth Fellow at Harvard, under one of Quine's own courses, and that he had displayed (or done, if you must) some outstanding 'work in logic'.
The connection between Dick and Grice is more tenous, or shall I say, implicatural, in nature!
There was a post in the Grice Club which was basically a quotation from P. M. S. Hacker's essay on Witters (or Wittgenstein, if you must). Hacker has a thing, like I do, matter of fact, for alphabetical ordering. And he manages to try to list the members of what J. L. Austin called his 'kindergarten' -- i.e. the members of that play group that he led and that met on Saturday mornings. The list starts -- I shall use set-theoretical formulation to please Jones:
PG = {Dick, Grice, ...}
i.e. Dick is the first in the list, followed by Grice. I don't think Hacker is trying anything too deep, since, give me five minutes or so, and I shall find members for the play group starting with A, B, and C -- so Dick would NOT be the first!
In any case, why does this relate to The Eternal Truth?
Well, in "Dear Carnap, Dear Van: The Quine-Carnap Correspondence and Related Work," edited by Richard Creath, we read:
"Among it various communications from Marcus Dick, trying to get in touch with us."
So, yes, Dick made it to the Carnap annals, too! The interesting thing is that the communications could not be reciprocated because Marcus Dick left no 'future address', if you can believe that!
Ah, well.
In his biography, Quine notes that Dick had been a Commonwealth Fellow at Harvard, under one of Quine's own courses, and that he had displayed (or done, if you must) some outstanding 'work in logic'.
The connection between Dick and Grice is more tenous, or shall I say, implicatural, in nature!
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