[lit-ideas] Re: "Must We Mean What We Say?"
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2007 22:19:36 +0100 (BST)
--- wokshevs@xxxxxx wrote:
> Quoting Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
> snip
>
> Interesting. I wouldn't threaten Sir Karl with a poker but I would offer
> the
> following thoughts:
>
> Putatively, the verificationist criterion of meaning is meaningless because
> it
> itself is unproveable on its own terms. It thus contradicts its own
> presciption. But isn't it odd that a meaningless maxim or prescription
> could
> still bear sufficient meaning to be identified as self-contradictory?
It is odd - and this oddity is part of the problem: for the fact an
unproveable prescription [that all meaningful statements are proveable] is
itself meaningful (in that it can be understood), itself disproves the
prescription.
There is a way to try to get out of this apparent self-contradiction - a la
the Tractatus:- but it is, I suggest, unsuccessful.
>Think
> of
> other self-contradictory maxims: 1) All persons shall be slaves. 2) All
> persons
> shall buy bread but nobody will sell bread. These maxims don't appear
> meaningless to me.
Nor to me.
>They are sufficiently intelligible for us to see that
> nobody
> could act on them. And the idea that nobody could act on a maxim is central
> to
> universalizability as a criterion of moral permissibility/impermissibility.
It is not clear to me that the problem is that these maxims 'cannot be acted
on' - rather it is that they are paradoxical, and this is what underlies why
they cannot be acted on [there are perhaps (many?) non-paradoxical things
that cannot be acted on?].
(1) is paradoxical because slave and master are both assumed to be opposite
and mutually necessary. However, we could surely conceive a circle of persons
who are 'master' to those to the left and 'slave' to those to the right: such
a circle could be complete and non-paradoxical: of course such a circle
depends on the assumption that one can be both master and slave. It is the
assumption that all persons can be entirely and only slaves [to others who
are masters] that is paradoxical.
This paradox is surely conceptual and not action-based, even if its
conceptual impossibility means an actual impossibility [i.e. we could not put
into action a circle where the persons in it were entirely and only slaves,
without masters].
(2) is even more paradoxical than (1) in that it is impossible to conceive a
circle where everyone buys but no one sells bread.
Still the paradox seems logical/conceptual, rather than action-based.
So the suggested link to "universalizability as a criterion of moral
permissibility/impermissibility" is here unclear me.
Donal
Apologising for the typos in my previous posts btw
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