Grice v. Carnap on what philosophy isn't

Here's a draft for "The City" which dates back a while.  I stumbled across it and made a pass at bringing it to a close.

In (once) recent postings to the Grice club Speranza and I have touched anew a topic on which we have not wholly agreed in the past, perhaps in the manner in which Grice and Carnap might have differed.

At its most stark there is a radical difference between Carnap and Grice on the scope and nature of philosophy.

For Carnap philosophy is confined to a priori reasoning yielding analytic truths expressing necessary propositions, which he would rather have in some formal language by way of escaping the inescapable ambiguity and logical incoherence of natural languages.

Our knowledge of natural languages falls under Hume's "matters of fact", hence a posteriori, synthetic and contingent.
For Carnap the study of such things, a posteriori knowledge, is, by definition empirical science, and for this he is called scientistic.
Well perhaps not just for that.  Its not just that he calls it science, but also that the "unity of science" demands that these phenomena be considered continuous with, and addressed by the same methods, as the rest of science.

I have tended to talk in a similar manner, at least some of the way.
So I talk about the study of natural languages as belonging to empirical science, even though I don't myself subscribe to the "unity" thesis.
(and I might add, that Carnap's pluralism is a reason to wonder how substantial the "unity of science" was for him).
Against this, Speranza, who knows more about natural language, philosophy of language, ordinary language philosophy and the science of linguistics (none of these to be confused) objects, quite rightly.

There are a few points here on which I will gently criticise Carnap (where others would do so enthusiastically).
A lot of it is "mere" terminology, some of it is demarcation, which is also terminology.
Thus, in my case if not in Carnap's, its little more than inept terminology to talk of all a posteriori knowledge as belonging to science, and it's worth pleading that if that's as far as it goes, then it doesn't really amount to Grice's devil of scientism.
On the other hand, insisting as Carnap did (though he did soften) that philosophy is confined to analytic pronouncements, is the kind of terminological eccentricity which appears as a controversial demarcation, and an intolerant ejection from the status of philosophy of much that philosophers have done.

The suggestion of dogmatism may be contested, for Carnap was more conspicuously pluralistic than he was an advocate of the unity of science, and these two are in tension.
The unity of science is most forcefully presented as a doctrine about language, as some kind of reductionism of the whole of language to one special language.
But Carnap's pluralism rejects the thesis that any language has a special status. He wants phenomenalistic, physicalistic and "theoretical" language all to be equally acceptable, and expected each science to have its own special language.

Grice has an incompatible principle which also looks as if it might be one of those terminological/demarcation things.
It might just be methodological, that all philosophical problems should be addressed in the first instance by a careful study of the relevant ordinary language, but it is hard not to see this as a refusal to accept as philosophy those kinds of problem for which ordinary language can provide no illumination, and thus as a matter of demarcation.
Could Grice really have believed that there are no philosophical problems for which a preliminary study of ordinary language is not valuable, or even relevant, and which his doctrine would therefore be excluding from philosophy?

By way of a speculative gesture I'm going to suggest a concession to which I think Carnap might possibly have been amenable, and a complementary concession which, if extracted from Grice, might draw the teeth from this conflict.

It's principally about adjustments to terminology and demarcation.
The demarcation issue concerns the respective scopes of philosophy and science, and the point to press upon Carnap is that the real world is rather messier than his principled division of academic disciplines along lines inspired by Hume's fork (but not actually in conformance with Hume's conception of philosophy).  Not all scientists are concerned with empirical matters, there is such a thing, for example, as "theoretical physics", which is an entirely mathematical discipline concerned with the mathematical consequences of scientific theories such as the general theory of relativity, rather than with the empirical, experimental confirmation or falsification of scientific theories.

Likewise there always have been, and possibly always will be, kinds of philosophising which involve reasoning a posteriori to conclusions which are not purely logical, but which for one reason or another cannot be addressed by the methods of empirical science, or which will only become science after some kind of pre-scientific investigation (perhaps "conceptual elucidation") has rendered them fit for scientific investigation.

The concession for Carnap is to give up his simplistic conception of the words "science" and "philosophy", and allow that these be decoupled from the rigid association which he preferred between these disciplines and the search for synthetic and analytic truth respectively.

Carnap was capable of making this kind of terminological adjustment, bowing thus to necessity.  He did in fact concede on the scope of philosophy, and he also gave signs of conceding on the usage of the term "logical truth".
Certainly he did shift his usage of the technical term L-truth which for many years stood for "logical-truth" in the broad sense in which for Carnap took to be the same as analyticity.  In the transition from the first edition of Meaning and Necessity and the paper on "Meaning Postulates" which was to be included as an appendix in the second edition, he shifts to using the term "L-truth" for a narrow conception of logical truth and introduces the term "A-truth" for analyticity and the broad conception.

There is no sign that he is personally inclined to take the narrow view, but by this time it perhaps seems a fait accompli, that the community now takes the narrow view (without in general recognising that this is mere terminology).

Turning back to Grice, the concession we need is that, even if a study of the relevant ordinary language were allowed as an important preliminary (to philosophical insight), maybe sometimes there isn't any.  Surely there may be recondite and esoteric corners of mathematics or physics so far removed from everyday life that terminological issues can only be progressed through a detailed analysis of the scientific origins of the particular esoteric language.  Must these corners of science be devoid of philosophy?