[lit-ideas] "The Way of Words": Linguistic Philosophy & Its Method

"collected a
small library of books on research methods (experimental,  non-experimental
hypothesis testing, ethnographic and exploratory),  historiography, clinical,
legal and statistical inference, and also followed  with interest
developments in history of science, behavioral economics,  general systems
theory, and cognitive science."
 
 
---- And I collected -- and still am -- a small library on
 
PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD
 
There was Collingwood, "An essay on philosophical method"
Socrates on maieutike
Plato on dialectikhe
Aristotle on syllogistica
 
The empiricists on observational methods
Rationalists on hypothetico-deductive
Kant on transcendental argumentation
Hegel on Platonic dialectic revisited
Neo-Kantian on transcendental argumentation brought back to earth
Frege on logicism and analysis
Husserl on phenomenology as a method
 
etc. etc.
 
---- and then came Grice!!!!
 
---- All you need to understand THEIR (Oxonian) method is a book by MUNDLE  
(Published by Clarendon), critical, "A Critique of Linguistic Philosophy".
 
In the different chapters he discusses the methods of most members of the  
Oxonian school.
 
Within that school we can still distinguish methods.
 
Each will base his theories on particular weltanschauung.

Take the Strawson/Grice polemic.
 
Grice's theory is based on the parsimony of RATIONALITY (the cooperative  
principle, the maxims, the univocality of terms as a supposition).
 
Strawson's theory is based on truth-value gaps, conventional implicatures,  
and other
monstrosities.
 
So even within 'linguistic philosophy' (concerned with the *analysis* of,  
say, claims to knowledge) there's ample room for divergence and convivial  
'table-talk', etc.
 
Grice has a few papers on the 'how' that McCreery is talking about.
 
Grice would say that it all starts for him with a puzzle he has with an  
Expression E, e.g. 'know'.
 
He feels awkward about this puzzle. He tries to resolve it.
 
He adheres to a pre-Gettier-type analysis: the three clauses of the  
Plato-definition:
 
                          justified
                          true 
                          belief.
 
He goes on to see if that model applies to 'ordinary' statements of  
knowledge, and finds it does.
 
Some problematic cases, like "The student knew year when the Battle of  
Trafalgar was fought" in terms of borderline cases, or involving 
disimplicatures  
and implicatures.
 
And then the 'problem' ceases to be one. He has dissolved it for him (if  not 
therapeutically alla Wittgenstein). Grice loved to say that his love for  
'reductive' analyses was not a love for
'reductionist' analyses.
 
Then (an this is from a talk he gave at Wellesey, of all places, repr. in  
WOW) he concludes:
 
(I'm rewriting from memory and spirit more than letter)
 
"Some will say this is idiosyncratic, and parochial -- but the problems *I*  
have with 
a philosophical expression are MINE and ONLY MINE. If someone comes to  me
and tells me that "my" analysis of 'know' does not satisfy him, I could  care 
less.
My theory is meant to explain the worry *I* had with a problem, not *his*,  
if any."

Cheers,
 
JL
  Buenos Aires, Argentina.
 
 
-----
 
Cheers,
 
JL




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